Running Virtual PC under Hyper-V Beta
They say that a picture speaks a thousands words, so:
Yes! This is Windows Server 2008 running the Hyper-V beta with Windows Server 2003 installed in a virtual machine, which in turn has Virtual PC 2007 installed and running Windows 98.
And the performance is much better than you might think. In fact a little while ago I had this sort of setup with Virtual PC running a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine - which I then installed Office 2007 into and used it to check my email from time to time.
Now for a couple of caveats:
- Booting through the BIOS of Virtual PC is quite slow. Expect to wait for ~1 minute before the guest OS gets up and running.
- Get Virtual Machine Additions installed as quickly as possible - it really makes things much faster (for fairly obvious reasons Virtual PC cannot use hardware virtualization in this configuration).
- This is in no way supported! If you try this an find an interesting bug - feel free to send me a message but please do not call Microsoft Product Support!
To answer some other questions:
- No - there are no special steps to get this to work, it just works.
- Yes - Virtual Server works too.
Cheers,
Ben