Moving virtual machines between Virtual PC and Virtual Server

When you move a virtual machine from Virtual PC to Virtual Server (or from Virtual Server to Virtual PC) you will get a warning message stating that the virtual machine was made by a different program and 'may not work'. A number of people have had questions about this - so I will attempt to answer them here.

  1. What are the potential problems moving a Virtual PC virtual machine to Virtual Server?

    Virtual Server does not emulate a sound card. That is about it.

  2. What are the potential problems when moving a Virtual Server virtual machine to Virtual PC?

    There are two problems here. First - Virtual PC does not emulate a SCSI controller; so any SCSI virtual hard disks will not appear when the virtual machine is booted. Second - Virtual PC has a more limited set of IDE configurations that it can support than Virtual Server (only one CD, etc...). If a Virtual Server virtual machine has an IDE configuration that is not supported under Virtual PC - we will attempt to move the hard disks and CD's around in order to make things work - however there may be cases where IDE devices will not appear (for example - if you configured two CDROMs - only one will appear under Virtual PC).

  3. I have a virtual machine that I configured without a sound card, without SCSI, with only one CD-ROM and a safe IDE configuration. Why do I keep on getting this error message?

    The short answer is - you know it is safe but we do not. The error message you are seeing is a general 'version checking' logic. Because we have no idea as to what sort of emulated hardware we may have in the future - what we do is we store information about who created the virtual machine in the virtual machine configuration. When we open a virtual machine - if we find that it was created by a different program we warn and then continue. There is no further logic to attempt to figure out if things are okay or not.

 

Cheers,
Ben