Within Windows Virtual PC Part 3|Comparison Side A

Few will doubt the fact Windows Virtual PC XP Mode is a great idea, but where does it come from?

In essence, Windows Virtual PC is just a special edition of Virtual PC, which got the latest update, 2007 SP1, in last May. Windows Virtual PC adds in several key components that make life much easier to ensure users’ good reception.

Comparison|Virtual PC 2007 versus Windows Virtual PC

Intention

Ever since the official launch of Windows Vista, Microsoft had been flamed for the frequent occurrence of incompatibility when using legacy applications. Microsoft had an answer, but didn’t boast about it anyway. Seen in a white paper from Microsoft, we know that answer is Virtual PC 2007.

With the availability of Windows Virtual PC Beta, Microsoft also provided a product guide for it.

As seen between lines, both are provided with consideration mainly upon application compatibility of older versions of Windows.

So years ago, Microsoft could have rolled out their Windows Virtual PC, to enable the XP Mode for better compatibility for Windows Vista, but apparently they didn’t. You might wonder why? Lots of reasons…many a PC desktop back then were not that powerful to support virtual machines and the solution at that time is not so mature judged by present yardstick, and there are much consideration in marketing…

Apart from all those unnecessary tactics, let’s focus on the improvements over the former version to understand why today’s answer is a better one.

Also I’ll add VMware to the comparison to better illustrate the differences among these popular virtualization solutions.

User Interface

Windows Virtual PC

Virtual PC 2007 SP1

VMware Workstation 6.5

 OS support

 

In Virtual PC, the client OS is seemingly limited to Microsoft’s own products, though it didn’t say so. Windows Virtual PC inherited this.

Unlike VPC, VMware supports almost every client system in the industry, which makes it the No.1 option for many people.

…and some more.

User’s experience is that if you want to run Linux in virtualization, you better consider non-Microsoft solutions, because they don’t support the OS at all. However, if you just use a Windows system, there is really few differences among these choices, although people would like to believe Microsoft’s solution hosts better support for their own OS products.

One big difference: Up till now, Virtual PC based solutions cannot run x64 client OS in virtualization, where VMware solution provides native support.

Hardware Virtualization

Hardware assisted virtualization is a virtualization approach that enables efficient full virtualization using help from hardware capabilities, primarily from the host processors.

For Virtual PC, hardware assisted virtualization is just an option, without which you can still run a virtual machine fine. This is different from Windows Virtual PC, for which it’s a must-have condition, or WVP won’t even install.

Actually there is no need of hardware acceleration for running virtual x86 machines, or at least the virtual OS will still run quite okay without it. So why Microsoft insist on having it?

Though it’s a fact that hardware assisted virtualization is needed when you have x64 systems in virtual mode, mostly it will make no big difference on x86 client systems, in other words, x86 systems as clients will run quite fine with or without hardware virtualization.

Nevertheless, Microsoft learnt their lessons well.

Customers are impatient and quite forgetful, and will easily become unreasonable. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to explain to people why their neighbor’s computer can run an x64 system in VPC while they could only fire up an instance of x86. So just make it unacceptable for installing it in the first place. Now the complaints are for the hardware manufactures, or OEM vendors. Why did they not enable it…why they have a CPU without such feature sell in street…and whatsoever, just nothing wrong with Microsoft, it’s all technology’s fast pace.

Like Virtual PC, for VMware, hardware virtualization is truly an option.

Emulated compact drives

All modern virtualization solutions contains the ability to emulate compact drives, which helps facilitate the installation of operating systems/applications and files sharing.

 

In Virtual PC, there is no easy way to set compact drives. You have to start the virtual machine to have the chance to make some change, an area long flamed by users’ criticism.

Inheriting such a bad feature would no doubt bring the maker floods of complaints, so Microsoft made necessary changes prior to possible angry demands. Finally, users can set emulated compact drives in an easy way.

A good one, Microsoft.

VMware had been impressive as to compact drive emulation, whose solution is the earliest and finest in this area.

 

Assistance add-on

Virtualization solutions all run upon a host operating system that has the right to decide what resource to be made available for virtualized systems. It’s impossible to discover all the devices and install proper drivers for them during the installation of an OS due to the unavoidable property of virtualization. They all need to install assistance add-ons to ensure better user experience and integration between host and hosted systems.

Within Virtual PC, after the installation of OS, you have to install virtual machine additions to have smooth mouse and better graphic effects.

 

This got revamped in Windows Virtual PC with some added feature, renamed to “Integration Components”, and automatically installed by WVP’s setting up. Also a separate add-on is prepared for manual system installation.

VMware has a same kind add-on in name of “ VMware Tools”.

However, it not only provide basic aides to ensure smooth user experience, but also brings more possibilities to hosted systems through a much better emulated graphics card, which is the key difference VMware had made against all its competitors, their ace card.

\To be continued…\