Virtual PC and Virtual Server

markarend — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 04:58:00 GMT

Wait.. A posting not about SharePoint? How can this be? Well, it's somewhat related to SharePoint, since so many people use Virtual PC to host a development SharePoint environment. Since SharePoint requires Windows Server 2003, that's the best choice for us laptop users. Anyway, this is just a quick comparison between some points of these two products.

Feature	VPC	Virtual Server
Shared Folders?	Yes	No
Copy-n-paste?	Yes	No
Drag-n-drop?	Yes	No
Map a virtual NIC to a wireless physical connection?	Yes	No
Compact disk image to a separate location?	Yes	No
Management tools for multiple guest OS?	No	Yes
Performance	Great*	Great*+1
Runs as Windows Service (can auto-restart after host restart)	No	Yes

*Performance really can be very good, on two conditions: enough physical RAM on your host (2GB will do, but 4GB is much better), and putting the virtual hard drive on a physical drive other than the one holding the host OS. On a laptop, a USB 2.0 external drive works very well. Be sure to "safely remove..." the USB drive before unplugging it.

Bottom line: if your host is a laptop or desktop, use VPC. If your host is a server in the datacenter, use Virtual Server.

Sometimes people ask me about VMWare's products. Well, I don't run them so I can't say, but Andrew Connell has a good blog posting examining some of the differences, especially related to how we use them as SharePoint developers, consultants and trainers.

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Mark Arend : Virtual PC

Virtual PC and Virtual Server