Microsoft Virtualization Terminologies

  • Article

On various occasions I have noticed that people on DL's and newsgroups confuse various terminologies related to Microsoft Virtualization solutions.

Here is a quick list of the terminologies I am going to use in my blog

  1. Virtual PC: It is the Client Virtualization product from Microsoft. Virtual PC 2007 SP1 being the latest from this stable.
  2. VPC: This is probably the most confused term. VPC is another name for the product mentioned above. VPC is Virtual PC and not a Virtual Machine.
  3. Virtual Machine (VM) : This is what most people mean when they say they are running a VPC image. A Virtual Machine is the container for the Operating System running on Virtual Hardware.
  4. Guest Operating System: The operating system running on a Virtual Machine.
  5. Host Operating System: The operating system running on Physical Machine.
  6. Virtual Server: It is the older offering in the server space from Microsoft. Very stable and reliable product. Now replaced by Hyper-V in 64 bit Windows Server 2008 platforms.
  7. Hyper-V: Hypervisor based Virtualization platform from Microsoft. This is receiving rave reviews all around. Someday I will get to blogging about this too.