Virtual PC 2004 on MSDN Subscriber Downloads

Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 can be downloaded from the MSDN Subscriber Downloads. For those of you unfamiliar with VPC; Microsoft bought the technology from Connectix that allows you to host several virtual PC's on a single machine. Each virtual PC lives in its own isolated envirionment, and is physically only a single file of the host machine. To communicate with your Virtual PC's you can use either shared folders or (virtal) network connections. You can even access your Virtual PC's from anywhere in your network! This piece of software is great for software developers; you always have a clean machine to try something out. I keep a freshly installed Windows XP on my HD, and ever time I need to try something I copy that image. No more screwing up of your host machine.

Another nice feature is that you can rollback any changes (if you want so ofcourse). Imagine having a development server and staging server that allow you to try stuff out, without having to worry to something wrong; you can allways rollback to it's previous state.

If you want to use Virtual PC, make sure you have plenty of memory, since the memory each Virtual PC uses is not virtual, but physical. :-)

4 Comments

  • Ok, Question... We have been using VPCs here at my company for testing and such, but are having issues trying to log them into the local domain. We have searched all over the web and can't find any posts about anyone else having trouble using the Virtual Switch functionality. You see, our issue is this. We want to set up a VPC with Server 2003 and be able to access it from anywhere on our lan. Well, if we use NAT and try to ping the box we get a response from the Host box and not the VPC box. If we try to use Virtual Switch we can't even get the VPC to obtain its own IP using DHCP. We have tried this on numerous different Host PCs and still the same results. It doesn't even matter what OS the VPC is running, the only way we can get a network connection is using the NAT configuration and of course this will not work if were trying to run the VPC as a 2003 Web Server. This is also the case at my house in my network set up at home. Any ideas? Has anyone else had these issues with VPC? Other than that, the product is awesome!

  • VPC has had no problems on my machine obtaining an IP from DHCP. Maybe an ipconfig /renew might help? Just grasping at straws...

  • Well it's quite possible our issue is that we are using 5.2 the Connectix product and not the recently released MS version 2004. We are going to download the 2004 version, and I will keep you all updated.

  • need product key hope you can help

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