I’ve come to the point where I have to install some virtual machines on my computer in order to do my work. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just download Hyper-V and go.”
Dream on.
You see, I’m running Windows 7 Ultimate. Hyper-V only runs on Windows Server 2008. That’s crazy. I can’t imagine why Microsoft can’t release a version of Hyper-V for Windows 7.
I can either re-image my machine with Windows Server, or I can buy VMWare Workstation. Or I suppose I could re-image my machine with Ubuntu Linux, install VMWare Workstation, and do all of my Windows work in virtual machines. The real choice, though, is whether I want to spend the time re-imaging my machine. VMWare Workstation is only $200. Considering the time and trouble involved in re-imaging a machine, I’m thinking that VMWare is the way to go.
On a related note, I ran across Microsoft’s Windows XP Mode download. What a well done package. A quick download (well, if 500 megabytes is “quick”), a no-hassle install, and I have a 32-bit version of Windows XP running in a virtual machine, with full access to my Windows 7 drives. It’s great for running those few 16-bit applications that I’ve been too lazy to port or to find 32-bit versions of. Highly recommended.
That XP Mode package is a brilliant piece of work, but Virtual PC (the virtualizer that XP Mode runs on) is 32-bit only. I need 64-bit, which Hyper-V supports, but Hyper-V isn’t available for Windows 7.
It confuses me sometimes how Microsoft can be so customer focused in some ways, and totally clueless to their customers’ needs in others.
As I recall, the XP virtual machine isn’t smart enough to pick up your username and password from the outer Windows 7 operating system. I know that isn’t normally done anyhow, but if you think of its job as to solve a problem rather than just to do virtualization, it would have been handy.
You’re right, Michael. It doesn’t pick up your username and password. That is unfortunate. Not a big deal for those of us who use these machines every day, but it’s probably something of a stumbling block for the less knowledgeable user.
Check out the VMware “player”. I needed a VM test box with a Windows7 guest o/s on my 64Bit Windows7 laptop and found this pretty easy to use. Totally agree with your Microsoft comments.
You definitely don’t want a hypervisor-based virtualization solution for consumer level virtualization… Look into VMware Workstation, Parallels Desktop, or Sun/Oracle Virtualbox (the latter is free). Also make sure hardware virtualization is turned on in your BIOS.
Hyper-V is aimed at enterprise. I think Microsoft was smart to disallow Windows 7 support for it; it should be run on a server.
I’ve just used VirtualBox to build an Ubuntu VM on Win7 64 (for testing libssh2), and it works perfectly.
Depending on your needs, you might want to look into it.