Microsoft Virtual PC 2004

[ElijahBaley]

Has anyone used Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 to set up virtual network labs?

how does the networking element of this program work - is it possible to network outside of the virtual environment, ie: is it possible to set up a virtual network and use the (real) host computer as a gateway for internet services?

Thanks for any help,

..EB


"Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!"

"Captain A.J. Rimmer, Space Adventurer!"

 

[jtb]

Short answer is yes... but it's less efficient than using "real" hardware... memory and CPU utilization is high... good luck!!

JTB
Have Certs, Will Travel
"A knight without armour in a [cyber] land."

 

[SjrH]

I've been hearing a lot about this Virtual PC stuff is it any good compared to VMWare? I've been using VMWare for a couple of years now, i've even managed to setup a Virtual Cluster on one machine! I found the networking with VMWare to be very configurable, although somewhat complicated at times.

SjrH - Data Security Storage & Availability Specialist

http://www.sjrh.co.uk

 

[stephen3rd]

I have also been using VMWare for years and i tried Virtual PC. The best thing i did was go back to using VMWare.

It is possible to configure pretty complicated network configurations on a single PC although as Jtb said you need to provide the same amount of RAM to a virtual PC as you would a physical one.

The VMWare manual is available for download from

http://www.vmware.com

and there are plenty of examples and diagrams of the network scenarios you can create.

 

[ElijahBaley]

Hmmn, I tried VMware a few years ago and it looked good - but Microsoft is giving away a free 60 day trial of Virtual PC

I'm just gonna get stuck in and see

..EB


"Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!"

"Captain A.J. Rimmer, Space Adventurer!"

 

[imeldesign]

Words from a Microsoft TechNet presenter I talked to-- use a TON of RAM for decent performance with Virtual PC 2004. He had 1.5gigs and was running four different Oses and he still had slowness issues.

 

[Overclocker]

Wow, that's amazing. I'm running 1.5 megs with VM Ware and so far I've run 6 virtual machines and they all run just as if they were the only one running.

60 day free trial of VPC 2004? Going to check that out right now.

Overclocker
(A+, Net+, MCP, MCSA W2K)

 

[NickFerrar]

On a recent Exchange 2003 course I was on we used Virtual PC for the environment. One each desktop we had 3 images, DC, Exchange Server and XP client - performance wasn't too bad (kinda like using a terminal services connection). I think the PC was a 2GHz + 1GB RAM, each image needed over 4GB HDD space to.

It was good to finalyl be on a course you could do lab work on your own instead of relying on classmates to set there stuff up and connect to it etc.!

From what I've seen Virtual PC is fine as long as you on;y want to do Microsoft stuff, if you want non-MS images to you need to use VMWare.

 

[TMEAGLE2]

Can anyone one tell me if there is a tool to migrate an existing physical windows 2000 PC to virtual (to run on virtual PC 2004?). I'm familiar with VSMT from Microsoft but according to the documentation only works in the with Server NT, 2000, 2003, not desktop operating systems.
Thanks.

 

[SimonDavies]

I am not too sure on the Virtual PC front but I am pretty sure there is one for VMWare. Sorry that's all I know for the moment, I will see what I can find out.

 

[stephen3rd]

VMWare P2V Assistant will do the job for VMWare. It will even convert MS Virtual Machines to VMWare.

Not sure if MS have a similar app.