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The Windows 7 RC is humming along quite nicely, and I promise that this will be the last Microsoft post for a while. The additional download of a Virtual XP environment intrigued me enough to download and install it. I can’t quite understand what the purpose of a Virtual PC running XP in Windows 7 can be, but here goes.

First off, it is a requirement that the target machine has a modern Intel processor capable of Virtualization Technology. Most Intel Core Duo‘s or better have this feature, but to be sure I downloaded Intel‘s CPU identification utility. The utility provides a basic overview of the CPU‘s capabilities

and the all-important Yes for the required virtualization support.

With the basic hardware requirement met, I downloaded the first of two files from Microsoft‘s site. Initially, a support package needs to be installed. The installation is quick, but requires a reboot. After the reboot, the system is ready to accept the installation program to complete the setup of Virtual Windows XP.

A few clicks is all it takes. The setup routine basically installs a virtual machine environment, then populates a pre-built disk image containing a functional Windows XP system.

There is no option to enter a user name for the OS, only a password. The name of the user is…User. That should be difficult to forget. Multiple logons are not possible with the free copy of XP Microsoft provides in the virtual PC environment.

Since we are talking about a vulnerable OS inside another vulnerable OS, it may be prudent to permit this XP to check for updates…

Once the setup has completed, you are left with a guest Windows XP system inside a virtual machine running on top of Windows 7. A nice feature is that the host OS drives are available automatically, permitting easy sharing of files from one environment to another. How this affects the overall security of the system as a whole is a totally different question: Windows 7 requires some form of virus protection, as does XP. That means installing anti-virus measures in the guest OS to ensure that no nasties bite the host. Anti-virus is not exactly a performance improver, and we are talking a basic virtual machine here. Extra functions to handle USB devices, power the VM off and send a Ctrl-Alt-Del to the guest OS are accessible from the Virtual PC menu bar.

I can’t see any corporate wanting to upgrade existing systems to Windows 7 only to run legacy applications inside a virtual machine environment. The headaches that would cause, not to mention the wasted administrative effort is simply not worth contemplating. Then, there’s the issue of the guest and host being very interoperable which makes most security types a bit nervous and requires two anti-virus licenses, at the very least. The virtual machine environment is dedicated to the single instance of XP, so it’s unusable for, say, Ubuntu or anything else, for that matter. It’s a lot of software for a simple XP setup that already runs well enough on a low-end desktop.

In my opinion, the provision of an XP emulation mode is not a bad thing, but the implementation by way of a complete, separate VM makes no sense: wouldn’t it have been possible to simply provide an XP wrapper in the main OS to run programs that require such support? Overall, I’m a bit confused as to what the Virtual XP thing is all about. Take one free copy of Virtualbox, add as many operating systems as you wish on top of your host OS and you have a much better, more flexible solution. With Virtualbox, the guest OS can be backed up, snapshots created and moved around as an image. That’s not possible with the Microsoft Virtual XP environment.