Once you know if the silicon supports it, check to see if your BIOS is set up to use those hooks. Intel Processor Identification Utility AMD Virtualization and Hyper-V compatibility Check. Intel and AMD have their own utilities as well, if you want to double check. Microsoft provides a free utility to check your Virtual PC will work on chips that don’t have those hooks, but not well. Intel and AMD have both built hooks into their processors that allow the host and guest operating system (the virtual machine) to trade off I loaded and ran it on a laptop running 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium on an Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of memory. Someone smarter than me should chime in to validate this.[ For complete coverage on Microsoft’s new Windows 7 operating system - including hands-on reviews, video tutorials and advice onĮnterprise rollouts– see CIO.com’s Windows 7 Bible. This VHD, once created, should be movable to a Hyper-V server, and if multi-booted in Win7 should be able to utilize the virtualization hardware once the HAL is detected. I recommend researching 'boot to a VHD with Windows 7.' As stated above, this solution would require another Windows Server 2008 box, or a Server 2008 multi-boot partition to create the VHD (I have a spare / clean external hard-drive for such drop-of-the-hat configurations). With the assistance of a 2k8 Hyper-V box, you won't even need a separate partition to do this. Has nobody considered creating a Virtual Windows Server 2008 R2 instance on a 2k8 box, and booting to that Hyper-V virtual hard drive using Windows 7 multi-boot? Win2k8R2 and Win7 can both boot to a Hyper-V OR Virtual PC virtual hard drive so that the virtual host becomes the physical host.Īs an added benefit, the virtual OS running as a physical OS (multi-booted to Win2k8 R2 virtual hard drive) should be able to utilize the virtualization hardware to run Hyper-V.

How to run virtual pc on windows 7