Desktop Virtualisation

I went along to Liam Westley’s excellent talk on virtualisation at Developer Day Scotland where he piqued my interest in the subject all over again. With Windows 7 RC I now have the option of installing Virtual PC Beta though I’m not clear if I can run my Virtual PC 2007 VMs in this environment (and I certainly can’t run my VS2010 VM as that’s running on WS2008 which isn’t a supported guest OS on Virtual PC Beta). I’m very tempted to give it a go.

Liam was also very positive about VirtualBox, a free, open source x86 virtualisation product from Sun which has some nice features such as snapshot support for easy roll-backs.

For now I think I’ll uninstall Virtual PC 2007, install Virtual PC Beta and hope that VS2010 Beta comes out before I have to do my next ASP.NET 4.0 session (otherwise I’ll be re-installing Virtual PC 2007 as I may as well use the WS2008 VM I’ve already created).

Update – I felt the above was a bit lacking in tangibles so I decided to go and check a few things out. I’ve installed Virtual PC Beta and I can indeed run VMs that were created under Virtual PC 2007. I can even start my WS2008 VM. Crucially however, as WS2008 is not officially support, there are no Virtual Machine Additions (or Integration Components as they’re called in Virtual PC Beta) so I suspect that’s not really a goer.

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