Part 1 - Preparation
Our extended firm is in the process of moving from the Vista operating system to Windows 7. As the first one in the consulting group to take the plunge, I had the privilege of testing the conversion process for some of our core applications.
At Perkins Consulting, we rely heavily on virtualization to manage the connection environments for our various clients. Consequently, one of the primary areas of concern for us in the conversion process was to make sure our virtual machines would still function under the new operating system.
Will they? Well, yes. More or less.
For those of you familiar with the Microsoft Virtual PC application, you'll remember that there wasn't a whole lot of difference between Virtual PC 2004 and Virtual PC 2007, at least cosmetically. The same is not true for the differences between Virtual PC 2007 and Windows Virtual PC (the Windows 7 virtualization engine). Virtual PC 2007 will not run on a Windows 7 machine. If you want to run a virtual PC on a Windows 7 box, you have to use Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7. And if you want to use your 2007 VHD files, you have to prepare and convert them for use in Windows Virtual PC.
As the official Conversion Sacrifice for PCon, I got to figure out how to make it work for us. In this two-part post, I'll describe the lessons I learned from the process. In the first part (the one you're reading now), I'll discuss preparing your legacy VHD files for conversion and setting up the Virtual PC application on the Windows 7 box. In the second part, I'll step through the conversion process for a 2007 VHD running Windows XP SP 3 as the guest OS.
Prepare Your 2007 VHD Files for Transfer
On your machine running VPC 2007, for each Windows XP SP3 VHD you wish to transfer:
- Remove the Virtual Machine Additions from the VPC. If the additions are up to date, when you select the Install or Update Virtual Machine Additions from the Action menu, the only option presented to you will be Remove. If you get an Install or Update option, you'll need to apply the updates and restart the VPC before you can get the Remove option.
If you fail to complete this step, you will most likely get a drive read error when you try to open the VPC with the Windows 7 version of Virtual PC.
- Windows 7 Virtual PC will only allow the following guest operating systems:
- Windows 7
- Vista
- Windows XP SP3
If the VHD you wish to convert does not have a supported OS, you may not be able to successfully convert it for use with Windows 7. I’ve seen some blog posts that others have been able to convert a VHD with an OS outside this list – Server 2003, for instance – but these are the only officially supported guest operating systems.
Prepare Your Windows 7 Box for Windows Virtual PC
- Windows Virtual PC will only run on a machine with hardware virtualization capabilities. Before installing Windows Virtual PC on your Windows 7 box, enable hardware virtualization in the BIOS. This is a critical step, according to the download notes. If you fail to make the changes to the BIOS, untold death and destruction may ensue. (Or at the very least, the application won’t run.)
- Install the Windows Virtual PC on your Windows 7 machine.
- In addition to the Windows 7 Virtual PC bits, the above site also has a download for Windows XP Mode. You may download and install this if you wish, but its use is outside the scope of this post.
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