VM while logged off?

[SunnyD]

Just wondering if there's any VM package out there that will let you run VM sessions in the background on a system while a user account is not currently logged in under a consumer grade of Windows.

For example, host OS = Win7, guest OS = WHS. WHS generally needs no user interaction from the console of the workstation it's on, so a VM could hypothetically run in the background quite happily.

Is this possible? Or would that require stepping up to something more big-tin related?

 

[Binky]

VMware server should be able to do this. By default I don't think it starts until logon, but you can change this.

 

[JackMDS]

WHS as a Guest VM.

Why? That is like defeating the whole purpose of WHS.



😎

 

[TheKub]

Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 is free and will do that. Though I think I prefer VMWare.

 

[SunnyD]

WHS as a Guest VM.

Why? That is like defeating the whole purpose of WHS.



😎

Testing purposes. Or perhaps to share server hardware with other server OS's. Some stupid reasons, yes I know. But there's reasons, and I was just using WHS as an example.

 

[JackMDS]

Since this is Not a normal scenario I never really spent time researching it.

In general if an application is running as a service it might run across users.

As is, VPC that runs a computer is considered by the Host OS as an Application.

When you log Off the account that it runs On it forces the VM to close Off.

Virtual Server on the other hand can run as a service. but the virtual Server is Not supported on Win 7.

I remember one time seeing a page that explains how to "Hack" the Virtual server to install on Win 7 (Google for it).

I do not know if then it would work as you want it, but you can try and tell us what happened.

Otherwise, the best way to experiment with VPCs is to run an humble computer with the free Hyper-V and out VM on it.

http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/how-to-get.aspx



😎

 

[Nothinman]

VMware Server does that fine. You can tell it which VMs to boot on startup and in what order, delays between them, etc.

 

[SunnyD]

Since this is Not a normal scenario I never really spent time researching it.

As is, VPC that runs a computer is considered by the Host OS as an Application.

When you log Off the account that it runs On it forces the VM to close Off.

The best way to experiment with VPCs is to run an humble computer with the free Hyper-V and out VM on it.

http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/how-to-get.aspx



😎

Right, but HyperV is it's own OS, meaning I would lose the benefits of having a native metal consumer OS in my setup. Ergo, my end-user Win7 environment would too be virtualized - which is absolutely not what I want.

The notion is that the Host OS is the native OS for the user running at full metal speed and providing all base resources that the system can provide (eg: full hardware video support). Any other guests can happily be virtualized.

In any event, it appears the VirtualBox has a "headless mode". It's about 1/2 of what I'd like to be able to do, or about 2/3 if coupled with running as a service. It may be where I start.

 

[GhettoFob]

VMware Server

 

[RebateMonger]

I have Windows Home Server "production" servers running under both Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Hyper-V Server. Both of these are free and don't require anybody to be logged into the host for guest OSes to run.

If you are going to use Virtual Server, look up the article by a Microsoft employee on how to set this up. It requires the virtual disk be run with the "SCSI" synthetic controller if your virtual hard disk is to be greater than 137 GB. It's no big deal, but requires a couple of extra steps.

Hyper-V and ESXi should both work fine, but those are both low-level hypervisors and are not intended for general purpose "workstation or playstation" use. MS Virtual Server and VMWare Server would be more suited to "testing".