Microsoft Virtualization and Virtual PC 2007

Greetings!

I’m Jeff Woolsey, a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft focused on Microsoft Virtualization. I’ve worked on virtualization technology for over ten years such as Virtual PC for Mac, Virtual PC for Windows and Virtual Server. These days I spend most of my time on Virtual Server and our new hypervisor based virtualization (codename “Viridian”) which will be a key technology of Windows Server 2008.

I have the pleasure of regularly meeting with customers and partners and one bit of feedback I receive often is that folks want to hear more about what we’re doing in terms of virtualization. With this in mind, I thought I’d take some time to start blogging about Microsoft virtualization. The focus of my blogs will be Virtual Server and our new hypervisor based virtualization in Windows Server 2008, but for this first article I thought I’d remind folks about one of our hottest downloads, Virtual PC 2007. Virtual PC 2007 was released in February 2007 and within the first 60 days had over 1.8 million downloads. We’ve hit well over 2 million downloads now and still climbing…

Virtual PC 2007 can be freely downloaded from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx

Here’s a list of some of the new features:

1. Support for hardware-assisted virtualization. Virtual PC 2007 includes support for virtualization technology from Intel and AMD. By default, hardware-assisted virtualization is enabled if the feature is enabled on the physical computer. You can turn this assistance on or off for each virtual machine by modifying the virtual machine settings.

2. Support for Windows Vista. Virtual PC 2007 includes support for Windows Vista as a host and guest operating system within Virtual PC.

3. Support for 64-bit host operating systems. This release of Virtual PC 2007 supports 64-bit host operating systems. However, there is no support for 64-bit guest operating systems.

4. Network-based installation of a guest operating system. The virtual machine network adapter includes support for performing a PXE boot. This means that when the appropriate network infrastructure is in place, you can perform a network installation of a guest operating system without using a PXE boot floppy disk.

5. Running virtual machines on multiple monitors. Virtual PC 2007 includes support for viewing virtual machines on multiple monitors of a physical computer. If you have more than one monitor attached to your physical computer, you can view a virtual machine on one of the monitors, in either window mode or full-screen mode.

6. For more details, check out the release notes…

Generally, I’m going to focus on server virtualization so I’ll be discussing Virtual Server and Windows Server virtualization. I may touch on Virtual PC now and then, but Ben Armstrong (VPC GUY) has done such a great job blogging on Virtual PC, that I’d rather point you to his excellent blog here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/default.aspx

Finally, to our millions of customers who have downloaded Virtual PC, a huge THANKS. It’s your feedback that drove this release.

Cheers,

-Jeff

Published 10 July 07 01:18 by WSV_GUY

Comments

# James O'Neill's blog said on July 10, 2007 6:01 AM:

After the response I got from people who wanted to be on the Windows server 2008 Virtualization TAP programme

# VolkerW's WebLog said on July 10, 2007 10:46 AM:

Starting yesterday Jeff Woolsey, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft in the Microsoft Virtualization

# Noticias externas said on July 10, 2007 11:28 AM:

Starting yesterday Jeff Woolsey, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft in the Microsoft Virtualization

# Just code - Tamir Khason said on July 10, 2007 2:02 PM:

Mike Swanson keeps up-to-day his list of WPF Tools and Controls . Absolutely useful page. Charles Petzold,

# Peering through Windows... said on August 3, 2007 6:34 AM:

I've had the pleasure of watching Jeff Woolsey present a few times now, most recently at our internal

# Windows Virtualization Team Blog said on March 12, 2008 3:16 PM:

So we just announced the intent to acquire Kidaro, a desktop virtualization vendor based in Silicon Valley and with R&D in Israel. Kidaro entered the desktop virtualization management market nearly 17 months ago with their Kidaro Managed Workspace product.

# Virtualization Report | David Marshall said on May 18, 2008 1:12 PM:

Around the same time that VMware updated its Workstation product with a new refresh build, Microsoft also updated both of its hosted virtualization platforms, Virtual PC 2007 and Virtual Server 2005 R2, with Service Pack 1 updates. As we all know, Microsoft

# Just Code - Tamir Khason said on January 1, 2009 2:08 PM:

[This blog was migrated. You will not be able to comment here. The new URL of this post is http://khason

# blaine bullman said on August 12, 2009 5:05 PM:

I find virtualization so interesting, it's been around for a few years now but I think it still has a long way to go and a long way to go. I'll be checking out virtual pc.

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