It has been long time from when I am using Virtual PC from Microsoft; I have also tried Virtual Server from Microsoft. 

But there performance were not up to mark when you have guest OS which have heavy software’s like BizTalk, SQL , MOSS which does lot of disk I/O as well as lots of CPU too. With the ageing of these guest VM the performance of these decreases a lot. Both Virtual PC and Virtual Server were enough for me until I needed a “x64 Guest OS”.

I then went for “VM Ware WorkStation”, just for x64 Guest OS. The performance was *OK*.

The present Laptop configuration which I have is

·         DELL Latitude E6400

·         Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T9400 @ 2.54Ghz

·         4 Gb RAM

·         250 Gb Hard disk

·         Windows Vista x64 Enterprise

Virtual PC on top of this configuration allows you to run only 32 – bit guests with ok performance but if you are working on BizTalk, MOSS etc.. You will feel that it should be better. Virtual Server also results in almost the same performance.

With VM Ware WorkStation you will get capability of Hosting x64 Guests, which is one of the important things. Though our team was using VM Ware with 32 –Bit Windows 2008 with VS 2008 SP2, CS 2009, and Azure SDK etc, the performance was better as compared to that of same things running on VPC 2007 and we were satisfied with it.

Lately one of my colleagues pointed me to Virtual Box, it has been only 1-2 days I am using this but I am impressed.

·         You can point to both of you VPC Machines and

·         VM Ware machines

·         Open Source

And it also provides you a Seamless Mode, which allows you to run Guest programs seamlessly with the host OS. See the below image in which I am running Windows 7 as guest on x64 Vista Enterprise. And you can see

·         Task Bar of Vista and Windows 7

·         Calculator of Vista and Windows 7

·         And Media Player of Vista and Windows 7

The performance also seems to be good.  So …go and try Virtual Box.

The thing which are left is try these

1. Windows Server 2008 with Hyper – V.
2. Windows Virtual PC