Use a virtual machine -- it's free!

This is awesome thank you for the great tip.

trix

Can someone answer my question(s) please? Can the virtual PC from Microsoft be used on multiple computers if it is stored on a flash drive?

I think so, if you can make virtualpc 2007 store the virtual hard disk on your usb drive. You'd have to install virtualpc on the other computer all well though. I'm not totally sure it's possible, but I think it is.

Virtualbox is also a nice program
http://www.virtualbox.org

virtualbox is easy to learn As far as I know, it has more features than virtualpc 2007, but I'd recommend virtualpc 2007 to the beginner because it tends to be easy to configure (I had virtualbox configured within 1 minute though, really easy )
and since more people know it, I guess it would be easier for you to solve problems you might encounter

cool dude thanx

Is it against Microsoft's licensing policies to have the same copy of Windows XP installed on the guest machine and the host machine?

awesome system. thank you so much

OK, i see the advantages of using this software for the home users. But how would it benefit a large organisation.

VMware states that it is used by the top 100 companies.

For example, If a large company was to have a physical server PC and inside that, 10 virtual PCs running as servers, how would this benifit them? I understand that they are easy to maintain. But at the end of the day its still one piece of hardware doing all the work.

If it is used for a client PC then only one person can sit at a workstation at a time. So it must be used as a server.

I ask becasue companies are using it, so it must have benifits and i am just interested.

Uhm.. You are missing so much information that I don't know where to start! (Not all of the following applies to the "consumer" programs discussed in this thread).

OK, first.. Who says that you have to run virtualised PCs or workstations? You can virtualise servers too!

The beauty of virtualisation is efficiency. If you have 10 PCs or 10 dedicated servers, then most likely they are using some 10% of their CPU capacity and maybe 20% of the disk space and power requirements. So, a single server can easily run 8 virtualised PCs/servers and you can hook it up to a decent storage solution that lets you dynamically manage disk space. Instead of 90% or 80% waste/overhead, you can have 20% "just in case".
Not to mention the space efficiency. You can shove 10 blade servers in 5U that can run 50 virtual servers. Quite an improvement over 50 1U (or, the horror, 2U) servers consuming enormous amounts of power (and generating the equivalent heat). Of course, there are workloads that require dedicated servers and will consume all the available resources, but majority of the servers in most setups are extremely underutilised.

Redundancy. You can have clustered virtualisation. N amount servers running X amount of virtual machines. In case of a server failure, all VMs on that are restarted on another. In case of planned downtime, you just migrate the VMs away from the server, shutdown, do your stuff and move the VMs back. In case any of the VMs demands more resources, the others are moved away from that physical server to give more resources to the hog.

Backup. You can take point-in-time snapshots of all your VMs to undo any software changes.

Automation. Want to shut down half of your servers at a given date or time? It's 10 mouse clicks away instead of configuring lights-out on 50 servers separately.

Etc etc etc etc.. I really can't think of all the cool stuff here

WOW, I see. Thats awesome.

Lets say a company has 10 PCs or servers, running at 20%. Why not just get rid of 5 servers and run 5 at 40%....or get rid of 7 and run 3 at 60%...

Or is there so much one computer can process at a time and having many (virtual) PC's in a PC allows it to process more. If that makes sense.

I don't really know much about IT, i'm more into business. So maybe the above statement is crazy to you, and the answer is obvious.

Thanks for giving your time, much appreciated.

Well, with PCs it is obvious.. It's pretty tricky to make users share a PC

As for servers.. Yes, you could lump several services into one box even without virtualisation, but that brings a lot of reliability, security, stability and compatibility issues. Imagine a Windows server that runs 10 different business-critical services. Patch Tuesday comes and all your services go down at reboot. Compare to 10 virtual servers that you can reboot one by one, interrupting only one service at a time.

Well thats makes sense. Virtual all the way!

Cheers. I will use it for my home use. As i find myself reformatting more and more as i seem to test software and it makes my OS 'messy'.

But the server use was what interested the most and the points you put accross were very good. Thanks.

there's one question everybody forgot to ask: how do u remove it in case u've had enough???

Usually you do the totally radical and unthinkable thing: go to add-remove programs and choose to uninstall.

OEM OS Can't be virtualized?

My XP came pre-installed on my PC, as do so many. In order to have a vurtualized XP machine, must I go out and buy a full new-install version of Windows?

Short of doing that, do I have any other options besides maybe a virtualized Linux installaton under Windows?

Very interesting stuff. Thanks, guys.

in that case forgive me for my totally and ridiculous question!

Yes, you are allowed to have only one installed copy of your XP.

I suppose you could do what I did - install Linux as the main OS and put the XP in the virtual machine.

sorry if this was answered already, but how much will this slow your computer down by? is there a certain minimum requirements or something?

Good information there!

For windows, this means running your VM as a GUEST user.

Create a "RunAs" short-cut in Windows XP that saves the User password

* Create a normal Short-Cut to openvpn-gui.exe (c:\program files\openvpn\bin\openvpn-gui.exe) on the desktop.
(or whichever VM product you've installed)
* Right-click the short-cut and select Properties.
* In the Target box, insert the following before the path to openvpn-gui.exe: "runas /savecred /user:guest ".
* Double-click the new short-cut, and enter the guest password.

Next time you run this short-cut, it will start OpenVPN GUI as guest automatically without prompting you for any credentials.
If you want OpenVPN-GUI to auto-start when you logon, move this short-cut to your "Startup" folder
on the Start->Programs menu.

edit: ( using WinXP Home? you can't use the /savecred switch with runas.exe as it is ignored )

Minimum Spec for Virtual Machine

Just wondering what sort of minimum spec is required to run a VM ?

This is just wishful thinking on my five year old PC but traffic permitting I might be on the road to self employment so I am dreaming of dual core with sufficient RAM

Not very enthusiastic at the thought of having to have a linux as the primary OS. I make a big enough mess with XP home.

It depends on what virtualisation software you are going to use. All of them have their hardware requirements listed on the homepages.

And of course, you have to consider the amount of resources your guest OS needs. If you are going to put Vista inside a VM, then the host machine has to be top of the line while you can run virtual DOS with any old junk as long as the virtualisation program itself can run.