virtualbox.org

Is it possible to have both Virtualbox and Virtual PC running with virtual machines active in both?

I have read other threads which seem to indicate that it is problematic and I have experienced a Virtualbox error which creates log files when I try to start a Virtual PC supported machine.
I think I need an answer to the fundamental question before I try to provide the logs or pursue the question further.

Thanks for the pointer to that thread. I had read it, and did so again to make sure I had not misread it, but it does not answer my specific question.
Which is:

Can I run both Virtualbox and Virtual PC in the same host at the same time?

I do not mean one within the other either way round. Perhaps my original question was ambiguous, sorry.

Hmm yes I did reply a bit quick last night... but in essence yes you can run hypervisors next to each other, however you run a high risk of crashing simply because they are designed to be the only one. Its much like office 2003 and 2007 next to each other, word2007 in such case often crashes when excel2003 is running.

Thanks for the revision.
I ask because I have not found a statement in the Manual which precludes it. I would not expect Virtualbox people to go around checking that their product can live with other virtualization products. They want theirs to be the only one.

I am trying to compare the only two that fit my requirements. I have discarded MS Hyper-V as being too big (it is really meant for a server farm situation) and VMware as it seems to need a whole lot of chargeable extras to provide the same facilities.

Would you recommend I report the problem or just let it lie?
If yes how do I go about reporting a problem?

There isn't a problem because none of the hypervisors support the others, this is normal behaviour.

I don't have any problems with VPC and VBox both installed on the same machine an I have never heard of anybody having problems with that. You will probably have trouble trying to run them at the same time and I would expect major problems if you tried to run vms under both systems at the same time.

If both were using hardware virtualization, they certainly would not run at the same time. The first one started would block the other.

I can also attest that running VPC and VBox at the exact same time has not produced any problems that I have seen. At least they didn't.
I converted all of my VHDs to VBox a long time ago with the exception of some legacy devices like Windows 98 and DOS 6.2 which simply works better in VPC and which I still use albeit very rarely these days.

BillG wrote:I don't have any problems with VPC and VBox both installed on the same machine an I have never heard of anybody having problems with that. You will probably have trouble trying to run them at the same time and I would expect major problems if you tried to run vms under both systems at the same time.

I have not had problems either with both installed but only one running a virtual machine or machines at a time.

BillG wrote:If both were using hardware virtualization, they certainly would not run at the same time. The first one started would block the other.

This latter point is the answer to my question.
The machine I use to host these has the Intel virtualization on as recommended by MS to run XPMode. I am sure it will run VPC without it but not XPMode which I was trying. There is no benefit in running XPMode over an XP system under VPC, always provided you have the licenced copy of XP.

Is it possible to run Virtualbox without hardware virtualization help?

If yes then I may have a solution: No XPMode

I've recently stumbed on this myself, needing to set up VirtualBoxes over a Win2008 machine - and ultimately searching the net for why doesn't CPU acceleration get offered, and finding this thread in particular

I also found this solution, which may be administratively easier than registry hacks: http://derekgusoff.wordpress.com/2012/0 ... e-machine/

(...)The workaround (there’s always a workaround, isn’t there?) is to disable Hyper-V when you want to run VirtualBox. I found a few different ways on the web to accomplish this, including altering the registry, and running a command. But the only one I found that worked involved changing the boot configuration using bcdedit.

If you run bcdedit with no arguments, you should see a property called hypervisorlaunchtype. This will be set to off or auto.

To disable Hyper-V in order to use VirtualBox, open a command prompt as administrator and run the command:

Code: Select all

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off 

You’ll need to reboot, but then you’ll be all set to run VirtualBox.

To turn Hyper-V back on, run:

Code: Select all

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto 

and then reboot.

This helped me in my case, so I post it on this forum for other VirtualBox users in the posterity
//Jim Klimov

You can forget most of what this thread says, because the information is four years out of date. These days VM platforms generally use hardware assisted virtualization (VT-x or AMD-v), and generally only one client app at a time can be using it. Furthermore VirtualBox is incapable of running any 64bit guest, or Win8, some server versions of Windows, other recent OS's etc without VT-x, hence in practice no other VM platform can be running at the same time. However, if you have a 32bit guest then yes, it will still run (kinda - i.e. making sure of that has not been a recent priority for the devs I suspect).

Well - VirtualBox did kinda run while HyperV was loaded and unused, but it ran somewhat slowly and unstably; for example, Solaris and OI guests failed to boot, freezing soon after the OS banner (maybe the apix bug - didn't get to test it), and the whole server got hung after a while (though it may be its hardware problem). Some Linux/DOS-based repair utility ISOs did not have particular problems booting, though disk IO seems to have been slower thatn now with assisted virtualization.
After I found this trick to disable HyperV, the VirtualBox VMs can use HW-assisted virtualization and do actually work
Hence I posted it to help other VirtualBox users stranded on Windows for any reason