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Microsoft and Virtualisation -- GRH GRH - BAD
Hi all
To anyone who uses Virtual Machines a lot the "Official" stance of Microsoft is rather disappointing.
Unless you have an "Enterprise" version which presumably means as far as Windows 7 is concerned the Enterprise, / Ultimate and maybe the Professional versions then you won't be able "Officially" to run the OS in a Virtual Machine.
Since the most popular version of Windows 7 is likely to be the "Home Premium" equivalent this could be a real setback -- even on this board a load of people use VM's.
However whilst they can presumably "Hobble" Virtual PC to check for the Guest OS being loaded and refuse to "power on" if it's not a permitted Guest OS I don't think there's much they can do to stop you running these versions of W7 as Guest OS'es using Vmware (workstation or the Server - which is free but a bit more fiddly to set up) or VBOX - but it just shows you that some of the top management must be "a few planks short in the Upstairs dept".
It's this sort of mentality -- we've seen the same from Music andd film execs that probably CAUSE piracy. After all using a VM is a perfectly good way of doing a lot of testing of an OS without a lot of the usual hassles and problems of running on a Real machine or having to buy a load more hardware.
With the rig I've got now as my main Desktop I can comfortably run 8 - 12 VM's -- maybe more and I'm not the only one with a decent rig these days.
Pretty well any Dual / Quad core machine with even only 4GB main memory will easily run 2 or 3 largish VM's without even noticing they've been powered on.
(OT but I'll post later how you CAN CREATE VMWARE type virtual machines s and run them for FREE using VMPLAYER - VMPLAYER has a restriction in that it can't create Virtual machines but I've got a little 100% LEGAL trick to show you how this can be done -- VBOX is OK-ish but IMO nothing like as stable as VMWARE products - Vmware workstation is good but rather expensive so I've got the get around).
So MS -- please at least come into the 20th cent if not in the 21st cent. Virtual machines are here to stay. Don't hobble the use of your OWN products for doing decent testing etc.
Cheers
jimbo