Windows 7 Host?

[mark rumsey]

I know it is early days, but has anyone tried running VBox on a Windows 7 host? I know it is not (yet) supported and I expect there will be problems, but I was curious how VBox reacted to the new OS. I ask for a couple of reasons. First, I am looking to upgrade my PC in the near future and intent to leapfrog Vista and go straight to Windows 7, so it would be good to know if I can run virutal machines for my older (non Windows) stuff or whether I'll need to dual boot into 'real' XP.

Second, I wondered how VBox compared to the new Windows VirtualPC (a version of MS VirtualPC) that ships as part of windows 7 and provides fully integrated seamless WindowsXP application integration by running the applications in a virtual XP machine in a simiar way to running windows applications using Wine in Linux. This new development from microsoft is obviously going to have an impact on the use of VBox as it effectively makes VBox redundant if all you want to do is run XP under Win7.

If Windows VirtualPC isn't restricted to just XP but supports (almost) everything covered by MS VirtualPC 2007 the impact on VBox will be greater still effectively limiting its use under Win7 to running non-Windows guests. That is, unless VBox have a trick or two up their sleeves to provide support for functions, hardware and so on that Microsoft don't, such as parallel ports at any address, virtual printers and other virtual legacy hardware, direcr (or indirect)access to other physical hardware such as firewire, CD/DVD drives & writers and so on. Thid, I'm just curious if anyone has tried it yet or if the VBox team are already working on Win7 compatibility. Thanks in advance.

[TerryE]

Mark, Windows 7 beta & Release Candidate is currently a development OS and not supported by the community (us volunteers/mods) directly. Because it's still in development, changes can be made at the last moment, which could cause to render all support done in previous versions useless and possibly cause serious issues. So if your are intending to play with the beta / RC version I doubt that you will get much effective support here for the immediate future, though as Win 7 matures will of course be building up that knowledge.

The XP environment with Win 7 is a pretty essential function for the Enterprise and as you say it is build on MSVPC technology. However, AFAIK MS only intends to offer this in its Enterprise and Professional flavours of Win 7 and not its Home versions. You can't run VBox at the same time as MSVPC and I don't know if the embedded version in W7 counts as "running at the same time".

For general performance measures, what ones I have seen indicates that in general VBox is generally faster and a more responsive user experience, but it is still to soon to just whether this will be the same with the W7 VM environment. As you suggest, the major problem with this is that it will probably make the running of non-XP VMs very problematic, but this is consistent with the MS strategy of Windows OS lock-in.

[shinji]

I have run VirtualBox on Windows 7 and it is the one that seems to actually work the best. Unlike MS VPC and VMware the NAT service doesn't crash or become non-functional. However as the previous individual said it is completely unsupported as of right now.

[mark rumsey]

Guys,

Sorry I've not been around recently, and many thanks for the info. The lack of support isn't a problem as I'm lucky enough to have a laptop runing Win2k that I'll be able to use alongside my upgraded PC and anything critical will be on that, at least until VBox is officially supported on the final version of Windows 7. I also know there's a chance that the final version of Win7 could be quite different to the current RC, although I suspect (and hope) it won't change that much. I think there is also a chance of this being the first OS from MS that won't need a major service pack soon after launch since I don't know when!

I've heard more recently about the Win 7 XP mode and, from VBox's point of view, the news seems good. It is coming out as part of Windows Virtual PC which, as far as I can gather, will only support XP as a guest (MSVPC is now hidden away on the Microsoft website and, although its still possible to download, its hard to find). Perhaps support for Vista and Win2k might come along later, but I would not be surprised if it doesn't. Also, WinVPC doesn't appear to be configurable by itself. It is set up by loading pre-made images (a bit like VMWare) and the only one currently available is XP. It is possible to use a machine created under MSVPC, but that's only possible if you know about MSVPC in the first place. WinVPC also requires hardware virtualisation and will not run without it. This effectively means WinVPC is restricted to recent processors. With MSVPC, hardware virtualisation was disable by default, and whilst its enabled by default on VBox it can be disabled. So, it looks like VBox isn't going to be threatened that much by this new WinVPC XP mode as it appears to be quite restricted. In fact, for anyone wanting to run a virtual machine on older hardware that meets Win7 requirements, or wants to run something other than XP, VBox looks like the best way to go. Oh, and if anyone wants to run a 64bit guest on a 32 bit host, VBox can do it whilst WinVPC and MSVPC can't. I'm currently running 64 bit Win7 RC as a guest under 32 bit XP at work as a trial and its running well. In fact, for some things the Win7 guest is faster than the XP host! The only problem I might have is the lack of parallel port support under VBox which means I won't be able to run one piece of dongle protected software under a virtual Win98 machine and may have to use MSVPC for that one.

As an experiment some time back I did run VBox and MSVPC at the same time and it was reasonably successf, although extremely sluggish. I was only able to do this because I was running both with hardware virtualisaion turned off (the PC I was using at the time didn't support it), and neither was trying to access the same hardware or virtual drives. However, it is not something I would want to do regularly and I imagine the risk of a conflict between the two would be very high. As I said it was also very sluggish, far more sluggish in fact than running two VBox virtual machines together to achieve the same thing. I think this might be because each system was trying to grab and hold the processor even when the guest was doing very little (i.e. guest 'processor' idle or nearly idle), starving the other of system of processor time, and with both trying to grab the processor, the background system functions were trying to all their stuff in the background with almost no processor time meaning the host ran slow, impacting further on the performance of the guest and host operating systems even futher.

[hungvt]

My host is windows 7 64bit,virtualbox 2.2.4 everything seem work fine but sometime VB hang and I can't access my windows 7 taskbar (But other App still work), I must press Ctrl + Alt + Delete and end VB then every things come back to normal! I don't know why! Any one like me?