win 7 on win 7 licencing

[johnpote]

My current win XP box has got so slow it's time I upgraded to win 7 (64 bit).
So my plan is to install win 7, then VB and then install a guest version of win 7. Get all my standard apps installed in the guest version and take a snapshot so I can restore it if it goes wrong or gets slow again.
Is this a good idea?
Also, to do this will I need two licensed copies of win 7?
Help on this appreciated,
John

[BillG]

No, it is not a good idea. You cannot restore a system from a vm into physical machine, just as you cannot restore a system from one physical machine into a different physical machine. The "hardware" is different so the device drivers must also be different. Also note that a snapshot is not a backup.

You would be better off simply taking an image of your system to an external disk using an imaging program (like Acronis, Paragon or Macrium or even the built-in Windows image program).

[johnpote]

Thanks for the reply.
Unfortunately it looks like I did not make the question clear enough. I meant that if the guest installation of win 7 failed/got slow for some reason then I could delete it and create a new one from the snapshot of the guest. (I'm assuming these operations are possible - I have not started upgrading my system yet so have not yet gained any VB experience.)
Hence my question about the licence issue. If I do attempt to install a win 7 guest then would it require a separate licence?

Regards,
John

[mpack]

You are talking about having a restorable backup of the VM, and snapshots are not a good way to do that. They just aren't robust enough. If you had any kind of mishap then your snapshot data structure is likely to be one of the first things affected.

Create your VM, give yourself about a week to get everything tweaked the way you want, activate it and then make a proper backup, not a snapshot. See Howto: Move a VM (backing up is just copying a VM to a removable disk). This is much safer and uses far less disk space.

[BillG]

And yes, you need a license for both host and guest.

[Rootman]

As Mpack said, Snapshots are just not the best tool for doing this.

What I do, regardless of physical or virtual, is to get it setup the way I want and then use a backup utility to take a "Gold" image of the OS. I store this gold image on several different backup media. In fact, for a brand new physical PC I actually back up the entire disk prior to doing ANYTHING to it - before I fire it up with the supplied OS in fact.

Should the bit-rot set in I restore from the Gold image. If a long time has passed since the gold image I will bring the Gold image up to date and make ANOTHER gold image with the updates.

Sounds like a lot of work but it's saved by bacon more than once, I also have the ability to restore the unit as "factory fresh" when disposing of it, no risk of accidentally releasing any of my private stuff that way..

BTW: I use Symantec Ghost at work and Macrium Reflect at home to do these backups from a Windows PE environment I built just for backups and repair.