But if I wound up going back, Altaro ( 2017) said that VirtualBox could use. (Kumar ( 2018) and Fisher ( 2018) said that VHDX would have several advantages over VHD, including support for VMs larger than 2TB, better performance, better protection against file corruption, and live resizing.
vmdk format, and multiple sources seemed to confirm that Hyper-V would only use VHD or VHDX format. Unfortunately, it appeared that reactivation would be necessary, because neither Microsoft’s Hyper-V nor VMware’s Workstation Player seemed willing to use the. I wasn’t pirating anything I was just trying to find a solution to problems that Microsoft itself seemed to be creating.
I didn’t want the hassle of reactivation, and I also didn’t want Microsoft to tell me, at some point, that I had activated Windows too many times. As the previous post further established, however, converting that VM to some other format would provoke Windows to conclude that it was now running on unfamiliar hardware, and therefore that it needed to be reactivated.
At this writing, Docker for Windows seemed to be primarily for developers, not end users.Īs described in the previous post, I had already installed and activated Windows 7 in a VirtualBox VM, and had tweaked that VM in other ways.
The best free Windows-compatible alternatives appeared to be Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware’s Workstation Player. When it developed that VirtualBox was not presently cooperating, I took a glance back at the previous post‘s discussion of alternatives. At this point, though, if VirtualBox would suffice in the interim, I would be inclined to buy time until the containerization revolution reached the world of the desktop VM. I had found it to be stable and reliable. I had spent a few hundred dollars for a copy of VMware’s Workstation, roughly ten years earlier, and I was not above doing that again, for a current version of Workstation. At this stage, for me, it seemed at least slightly wiser to use VirtualBox to the extent possible, mostly for its features but also for what seemed to be its moderately albeit not consistently superior performance. I felt that I had started to move past the point of basic struggles and frustration with VirtualBox. I did not use VMware Player as extensively as I had used VirtualBox. I found that Player was much more user-friendly than VirtualBox for basic tasks (e.g., moving and copying VMs). The performance exploration included particular attention to antivirus software. Once I sorted that out, I tweaked and configured the VM, and its Windows 7 installation, for improved performance and functionality. It seemed there were two ways to import a VM into VMware: the right way, and the way that I tried first. After resolving that question, I installed VMware and tried to import a virtual machine (VM) that I had created in VirtualBox. This post’s exploration of VMware Player began with the question of whether I should indeed treat VMware as the first alternative to VirtualBox.
Trying Again: Bringing It Over as an OVA Appliance At present, that was Windows 7, but it was also possible that I would develop VMs running Linux or Windows XP guests.īringing Over the VirtualBox VM as VDI/VMDK The “guest” OS is the one installed on the VM. Note: in VM-speak, the “host” operating system (OS) is the one installed on the computer (i.e., the physical machine).
The present post turns to the alternative of using VMware Workstation Player 14 to run Windows 10 software when Windows 10 failed to do so. A previous post discusses my efforts to use VirtualBox to run software that ran fine in Windows 10 - until, one day, something (a Windows 10 update, apparently) caused that software not to run anymore. Unfortunately, the VirtualBox effort also ran into audio problems that I was unable to solve.