All windows in one PC

[al'crack]

Anyone ever try to run multiple PC-based OSs and applications on a single PC or workstation?
This is known as VIRTUAL PC.
Pros and Cons will be greatly appreciated.

[satis]

depends on the OS you're running it under. Not that my experience is great or anything, but trying to run an O/S within windows is typically problematic. Lots of CPU slowdown and RAM overload. NT based systems would probably do better, but MS products are serious processor and memory hogs.

Under linux it's a different story. Though I haven't done it personally, I know someone that ran several virtual instances of linux under linux. He said that it ran pretty smoothly and with minimal cpu/memory issues. Also, if an instance crashed (or got hacked) or whatever, he could set up scripts to automatically kill it, reinitialize the FS off an image, and start it right back up. Very cool stuff. Great for honeypots too.

[RocketJeff]

Vmware (http://www.vmware.com/) is excellent - whether hosted on Windows or Linux, there's no difference.

I know of many people that develop Windows software and use it to test thier software under various flavors of Windows (using Windows as the 'host' operating system, also). I also know some Linux eople that use it to run Windows programs without rebooting.

Here's a review (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/oldnews/pages/fog0000000286.html) from one of the people that uses it for software testing.

[paulselhi]

if you mean multi booting i have had win 98, WIN NT server and workstation, WIN 2000 pro and server all running on one box with multiboot

No problems, though win 98 will not read the ntfs data and with win 98 boot partition ( or is that sytem partition ? microsoft call the partition that holds the system files the boot partitions and the partition that holds the boot files the system partition !!!) needs to be FAT

if you mean actually running 2 ops one inside the other sorry i have no experience

[satis]

btw, the a linux implementation of what you're talking about is UML (user mode linux). You can get it/read about it here:

http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/