Virtualization is a fantastic technology – especially for developers who want/need to work on different operating systems, need multiple different environments, or otherwise don’t want to muck up their machines. Given the current state of hardware today – a quad-core machine with 8GB or RAM can be built for as little as $500 – virtual machines are able to run at near-bare-metal speeds.
One downside to virtualization is that you can rule out just about anything 3D. Vendors of desktop virtualization software have been slowly trickling support for 3D into their products, but as far as I know these implementations are limited in their capabilities, and none of the vendors – not even the reigning champ VMware Workstation – supports Vista’s Aero desktop.
Enter Windows Virtual PC
After a long hiatus, we’ve finally been clued in to what the Virtual PC team has been up to. For Windows 7 Virtual PC has been resurrected as Windows Virtual PC. Unlike previous versions of Virtual PC (the last being 2007 SP1, last updated in May of 2008) this new incarnation has been integrated with the operating system and provides some very neat integration features.
Out of morbid curiosity I installed the RC of Windows 7 x86 in Virtual PC. Once the installation completed I was greeted with what is commonplace in virtual machines, no Aero.
As always, the first thing I do with a fresh virtual machine is to install the integration components and reboot. After the reboot everything looked the same – no surprise. But low and behold if you select Tools >> Enable Integration Features you are greeted with glorious eye-candy!
So Close…So Very Close
Having discovered this incredibly under-reported capability of Virtual PC, my next thought was to see if Aero would be enabled when launching an application in the guest from the host’s start menu (i.e. Windows XP Mode).
Nope…doesn’t work. Not sure if this is a bug or on purpose at this point – since the integration components in the guest provide the Aero capability as well as the ability to publish applications to the host, it seems logical that the components would enable Aero in host-launched applications.
More To Come
There’s some really neat stuff in the new Windows Virtual PC. It’s quite a shift from previous versions, and still has some significant limitations compared to the competition, but the improvements are very, very welcome! I’ll be working on a more complete post about using Windows Virtual PC, but in the mean time if you are on Windows 7 RC, go download it!