virtualbox.org

Hi All,

I am running Windows Server 2008 as a host. I have a separate server running Windows 2000 Server which is my production environment. I have SQL Server 2000 running on the Windows 2000 Server machine. I plan on upgrading Windows 2000 Server to Windows Server 2008, and SQL 2000 to SQL 2008 in a virtual environment on the Windows 2008 host.

My question is, will this have an effect on the type of operating system chosen during the initial stages of creating the guest VM? The step I'm referring to is when you choose the OS type and the version. Would I put Windows 2000, and will the OS type have an effect on the VM when it is upgraded to Windows 2008?

No, just change the OS type to the right one afterwards. The guest OS type is mostly used to set certain default options when creating the VM.
In addition is controls certain settings in the following cases:
- NT4: disables certain features to make NT4 not crash during boot (it can't handle modern CPUs)
- 32 bits Windows 2000/XP/2003: enables an optimization for AMD cpus when the IO-APIC is enabled