Darksylum

Hi there. I am wanting to take advantage of Virtualization. From what i understand it lets you use legacey operating systems on newer systems that already have an OS. I am running windows 7 64bit but I want to be able to boot to Windows 95 or 98 since I have some realy old games and programs that I want to be able to work with that are DOS based and just refuse to work on Vista or Win7. any idea what in the world I need to do? i want to break off some space on my extrernal hard drives NTFS and set it up as fat16 to do this. I know little of Virtualization Technology but if i understand it right, i can boot into windows7 and then load Win95 or 98 to run off my external hard disk and utilize 1 of my cpu cores? I know i am sounding stupid here, I just have no idea how to do this. I am a hardware man not a software man!


Any advice or instructions would be nice.
thanks

__________________
Do unto your computer as you would do unto your wife!
A head shot is only as good as the fps and ping that it is shot on.
Crapping red pew pew on the green boys since 1994!
You can't stop the RED TIDE

ComGuards

There are several ways of implementing virtualization. From what you described, you're looking at running an OS-as-an-Application, sort of thing. I can't speak for other virtualization solutions other than VMWare (www.vmware.com), since I haven't played around with them, but from that particular standpoint, you'd need a copy of VMWare Workstation 7.0 (latest). VMWare does offer a free virtualization platform, VMWare Server, but I don't think it would meet your needs, especially if you're trying to play games. Legacy programs and the such would be okay, but games wouldn't really run on Server, I don't think.

Actually the best way for you to "learn", would probably be to download a copy of VMWare server 1.x. Version 2.0 is out, but they've changed the interface quite dramatically. VMWare Workstation "appears" like Server 1.0 much more.

Just a heads up though, I really wouldn't recommend running any virtual machine off of an External hard-drive, especially not a USB or Firewire drive - the interface is too slow. eSATA is okay though. Actually with VMWare Server and Workstation, the "virtual hdd" is stored as a .vmdk file within Windows 7, so you just need to make space for a big file on your hard-drive.

Anyways, like I said, I can't speak for the other virtualization products, I'm sure other members can. But moving forward, get a copy of VMWare Server 1.10 (Free) to play with, and then upgrade to VMWare Workstation (Paid) if you think it suits your needs.

DuckieHo

BTW, Windows 7 Pro gets a free XP license for VirtualPC.

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Darksylum

hmmm interesting. So i can actualy do what i want to do by using my raid setup instead of an external hard drive without having to break off part of my NTFs Partition?
I can see this is going to be very educational.

__________________
Do unto your computer as you would do unto your wife!
A head shot is only as good as the fps and ping that it is shot on.
Crapping red pew pew on the green boys since 1994!
You can't stop the RED TIDE

DuckieHo

Look up Windows 7 XP Mode.

VirtualPC is well integrated with Windows and easier (IMO).

__________________
To answer most of your questions: (1) a fridge cannot cool a PC (2) 64-bit OS for over 3.4GB (3) If a PCIe card fits, it should work (4) Resolution, not screen size (5) If you have a question, it is not news (6) Report, not respond to Spam (7) Single-Rail/Non-Modular PSUs are not always better than Multi-Rail/Modular

ComGuards

Virtualization is heavily dependent on resource performance. In fact, with virtualization, the key components are I/O related - mainly memory and disk access. The processor doesn't actually have to be incredibly fast. So yes, you will *want* to do everything off your RAID array. For example, if you allocate 1GB of RAM to your virtual machine, you will actually see a process in your Windows 7 Task Manager that's using 1GB of RAM, literally.

With VMWare and Virtual PC, you're essentially "storing" a computer as simple Windows files, and you're just reading and writing to the contents of that file when working with the virtual machine. With regards to the virtual hard-drive file, it's roughly analogous to working with a compressed file (ISO, ZIP, RAR, etc). You're basically opening the file and reading / writing to the contents inside the file in real-time, so the faster the source hard-drive you're working with, the faster you can get things done.

Windows XP Mode and Virtual PC, as offered as part of Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate, allow you to run WindowsXP programs within Windows 7. Unfortunately, it has practically zero graphics acceleration, and it feels slower. When you launch an application under XP Mode, the base OS (Windows 7) still boots up the virtual installation of XP, and then launches the program. Unfortunately, you're limited to the one instance of XP SP3.

If you intend on playing with multiple legacy operating systems, better to go with a full-blown 3rd party solution, such as VMWare, Xen, etc. You can also play around with various Linux distributions without affecting your host (Windows 7).

And because you're basically running an application within Windows 7, any virtualization solution you choose will make relatively good use of multi-core systems. You probably don't want to set processor affinity specifically to the virtual machine, but let the application control it. That way, if your virtual machine is at 100% CPU load virtually, you would probably see a 25% usage on each of your processor cores when looking at Task Manager on the host.

Darksylum

so basicly i can acomplish what I am wanting to do right from within windows 7 with no hardware changes? I need to find a step by step article on how to do this. I am an idiot when it comes to this stuff lol.

__________________
Do unto your computer as you would do unto your wife!
A head shot is only as good as the fps and ping that it is shot on.
Crapping red pew pew on the green boys since 1994!
You can't stop the RED TIDE