Running Vista Ultimate on a Virtual Machine

[nordloewelabs]

VM noob here.... i have been recently awarded with a Promotional -- yet *full* and * time-unlimited -- Vista Ultimate disc at a Microsoft's Heroes Happen Here event. the disc has no mention to being an OEM. i plan to play with it in some Virtual Machine but i have some questions.... my specs appear at the bottom.

1) for this particular purpose of testing Vista as a Guest OS in an XP Home Host, is there any recommended VM software? should i go with VirtualBox, VirtualPC or VMWare? they all have free-for-personall-use versions, right?

2) i plan to buy a new PC in 1 or 2 years. at that point i will want to install my Vista Ultimate in it. would i run through license issues for having it already running in a VM? if necessary, i could completely remove the Vista installation from the old PC's Virtual Machine and have the OS solely installed on the new PC. no problem with that. i just wanna make sure that, by using this Vista disc in a VM, i wont be forever forbidden to use it somewhere else. like i said before, to the best of my understanding, it's a full version, not an OEM.

3) performance-wise, is it feasible to run Vista Ultimate as a Guest OS in an old PC? i just wanna get a little familiar with it. i'd rather have it in a VM than setting up a triple-boot box (i already dual-booting XP Home and linux). i want to keep my XP install at all costs. i know i dont have the optimal amount of RAM for a VM'ed Vista, but i just wanna get familiar with the beast. Aero and any visual fancyness would be turned off immediately after installation.


AMD 3000+, 1.5Gb DDR
250Gb HD ATA-100
nVidia FX-5500 128Mb
XP Home SP-2

 

[Pabster]

1.5GB total RAM really isn't sufficient for running Vista VMs.

You could squeak by running a 512MB VM but it will be slow.

With RAM so cheap, it may be a good idea to bump that up.

 

[Atreus21]

I'm only familiar with VMWare. 1.5 gigs total ram is woefully shy. I'd upgrade to at least 2 or 4, so that you can allocate 2 gigs to the VM without having to share memory. Sharing memory will destroy vm performance, in my experience.

 

[RebateMonger]

I've run Vista in a 500 MB Virtual PC window. It's slow.

Thanks, Toshiba, for not offering a BIOS upgrade so my 2-year-old Toshiba laptop can install Vista.

 

[Skeeedunt]

Originally posted by: nordloewelabs
1) for this particular purpose of testing Vista as a Guest OS in an XP Home Host, is there any recommended VM software? should i go with VirtualBox, VirtualPC or VMWare? they all have free-for-personall-use versions, right?

All good in my experience. VirtualPC isn't as great with non-MS OS's, so if you want to add a linux or whatever vm later you might be out of luck (if that matters to you).

2) i plan to buy a new PC in 1 or 2 years. at that point i will want to install my Vista Ultimate in it. would i run through license issues for having it already running in a VM? if necessary, i could completely remove the Vista installation from the old PC's Virtual Machine and have the OS solely installed on the new PC. no problem with that. i just wanna make sure that, by using this Vista disc in a VM, i wont be forever forbidden to use it somewhere else. like i said before, to the best of my understanding, it's a full version, not an OEM.

If it's a full version you should be fine.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
I've run Vista in a 500 MB Virtual PC window. It's slow.

Thanks, Toshiba, for not offering a BIOS upgrade so my 2-year-old Toshiba laptop can install Vista.

If the problem is that you can't install it due to installer problems, but think it might work OK AFTER it could be installed, you could try:

a) try running the vista installer from an active XP session

b) partition the drive with an active OS partition, and a reserved OS primary partition for vista. Start up a VM under your active OS, and install Vista onto the reserved partition using the VM for the process of installation.

c) Take the laptop HDD out, hook it up to a desktop PC with an adaptor of whatever kind, install Vista onto the HDD from the desktop, then pop the HDD back into the laptop and run updates/activation/etc.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Hey you might as well try it.

I've run VMs of NT or Win2K or XP before with only 256 MB, 384MB, 512MB level of memory allocated to the VM guest and they got the job done.

I guess it depends on what you want to do with VIsta. If you want to get the "experience" of the eye candy with aero, effects, lots of media previews, multimedia, DX10, etc., you're probably better off just waiting until you have a higher performance PC to run it.

If you just want to explore the basics of how it works, check out some application compatibility issues, get familiar with installing / administering it, see how well its firewall / defender works, etc. yeah sure you can probably get some good use out of it even on an XP Home host with 1.5GB total RAM.

If your main system uses DDR I'd probably stick with what you have until you can replace the PC.

If it uses DDR2, especially if it supports 2GB capacity RAM sticks, I'd highly suggest considering buying 4GB DDR2 now while it is relatively cheap / available. I don't think even in 1.5 years DDR3 memory will be a hugely beneficial asset compared to a couple of decent sticks of current DDR2. So the idea might be to buy soon if that's reasonable ($70 or so = 2x2GB DDR2-800) and just re-use it in the future.

I guess it just depends on if you have to have the state of the art CPU / motherboard with DDR3 in 1.5 years, or if you will be happy enough with DDR2 and the midrange chipset of the day + a CPU that'll be basically similar to today's highest end ones but much cheaper.

VMs always work better with more RAM, but at least you can start to play with it.

Enjoy your new Vista Ultimate et. al.!

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: QuixoticOne

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
Thanks, Toshiba, for not offering a BIOS upgrade so my 2-year-old Toshiba laptop can install Vista.

If the problem is that you can't install it due to installer problems, but think it might work OK AFTER it could be installed, you could try: ....

It's a well-known problem with Phoenix BIOSes that are ACPI 1.5, rather than the 2.0 or higher required by Vista. I've been looking for a workaround for a year and haven't heard of anyone succeeding.

 

[nordloewelabs]

Originally posted by: QuixoticOne
If your main system uses DDR I'd probably stick with what you have until you can replace the PC.

it's just DDR, so i wont upgrade memory again. i originally started with 512MB when i got the PC 4 years ago. the current cost of DDR is not worthy for an old system. i'll prolly allocate 1Gb to the VM. just checked my TaskManager and it says i'm only using 500Mb now. can the VM's memory allocation be changed any time (in case i realize 1Gb is causing trouble with the Host OS)?

i'm assuming that none of those VM apps conflict with each other.... they can be installed side-by-side, right? i might decide to try more than one.

btw, i read some VMWare documentation yesterday and, to my surprise, nowhere in it they mention compatibility between VMWare Server 1.0.4 and Vista Ultimate....(!) it seems that they dont officially support that OS (edit: installed as a Guest OS) on their free VM.

 

[Skeeedunt]

I think you can have all three installed at once. I've got vbox and vpc installed on the same machine.

Now that you mention it, last I checked (1.0.2?) VMware Server isn't "supported" on Vista - it still works, mostly, though I think it uses an unsigned driver so it's a bigger problem for x64. There may also be some performance issues (maybe only on x64?). I haven't checked into it recently.

 

[nordloewelabs]

what i meant was, VMWare Server 1.0.4 doesnt officially support Vista Ultimate as a Guest OS....ate least according to its documentation.