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PaulWaldman
Asked: 2009-12-27 21:17:09 +0800 CST

Windows Virtual PC and VirtualBox on the same PC

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I am running Windows 7 Professional x64. Presently I am using Windows Virtual PC. I'd like to try VirtualBox. Can both virtualization platforms be installed and run on the same instance of Windows? Does anyone have an experience in this?

windows-7

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I have both installed on my win 7 (64 bit) machine.

    However, you should not run both VMs at the same time.

    • VirtualBox is smart and will not allow you to run it if another visualisation process is running.
    • I have run both side by side - by starting VirtualBox first - but I would not recommend it (It is very likely that you will end up having one or the other VM crash).

    A useful tip: you might need to actually kill the VirtualPC process, vpc.exe, (as opposed to simply shutting down all its VMs) in order to get a VirtualBox VM to start.

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  2. Actually you can run both at the same time. Currently I run both VirtualBox with Ubuntu and Virtual PC with Win XP - on Windows 7. I experienced VirtualBox crash only when VB used multiprocessor config with VT-x/AMD-V enabled and then later Virtual PC was started.

    It seems that only one virtual machine platform may take advantage of hardware virtualization. Virtual PC takes over control of VT-x and thus crashes VirtualBox. I cannot find option to disable VT-x usage on Virtual PC so I just disabled it in VirtualBox machine.

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  3. You can install them and run them, but in my experience, not at the same time.

    Maybe it's just me (I never looked into it in much detail), but if I'm running a Virtual PC and try to start a VMWare Workstation machine, they kill eachother and both crash. But you can definately have them installed side-by-side and use them one at a time.

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