OT - Win 10 VM on a Win 10 install

I'm thinking about buying and installing Win 10 Pro and then using Win
10 Pro's VM feature to create several Win 10 VMs, e.g., one for web
surfing, another VM for gaming and a third for goofing around.

When I use Win 10 Pro's VM feature, do I have to supply a new Win 10
license to create and use a Win 10 VM or does the Win 10 Pro allow you
to make a Win 10 Pro VM with no additional licenses required?

Thanks,

John

Yes wrote:
I'm thinking about buying and installing Win 10 Pro and then using Win
10 Pro's VM feature to create several Win 10 VMs, e.g., one for web
surfing, another VM for gaming and a third for goofing around.

When I use Win 10 Pro's VM feature, do I have to supply a new Win 10
license to create and use a Win 10 VM or does the Win 10 Pro allow you
to make a Win 10 Pro VM with no additional licenses required?

Thanks,

John

Well, the first thing we have to agree on, is terminology.

A "typical" virtual machine situation, is you have a window
on your screen, with a second (guest) OS running inside that window.

That wouldn't be very good for gaming, because very few VM
environments give good access to the video card (Crysis won't
run at 30FPS). The best I ever used, was Connectix Virtual PC
for Mac, where a 3DFX card on the host, could be used for
gaming from the guest - directly. No driver interfered with
the path, and the guest sent writes to the GPU on the
card directly. The Mac of course, sucked for gaming, and
it still sucked with that special feature, but at least
their heart was in the right place. While VirtualBox
has "experimental DirectX support", that's not quite the
same thing.

But Windows 10 is supposed to have another capability.
And this isn't a virtual machine concept either. It
uses the container a virtual machine might use, but
without the overhead.

Normally, a user wanting to use several instances of the
same OS (same license key, only one running at a time), they
use separate boot drives for the OS instances.

But as I understand it, with Win10, there is some capability
to boot from a VHD file (a VM container). The BCD can have
its first reference, to a physical OS say, and the second
and third instances could be a VHD file with an OS inside it.
The same license key is entered in each one, and only
one of them can run at a time on the machine, so no rules
are broken. Rather than "wasting" a partition for each
OS, some of the OSes are merely images stored inside
a single VHD file. This means you could have a 1TB partition
and store fifty 20GB images, and have fifty slightly
different versions of the same OS. When you boot, the
boot menu has fifty lines in it, and you cursor down
to the one you want. And that OS takes over the machine.

And since I'm too lazy to go look for a Microsoft recipe,
I know the EasyBCD developer will have thought about
this one :-) The picture here at least acknowledges
the idea exists. So you can add VHD-contained OSes
to the boot menu with this. This beats doing it from
the command line, even if it only takes one BCDEdit
command.

https://neosmart.net/wiki/easybcd/po...es/vhd-images/

And if you need to move a physical OS, into a container
(that's called "P2V"), Sysinternals has a program for that.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sys...loads/disk2vhd

A second way to make a VHD, is use Macrium to backup to
MRIMG, and then Macrium has a MRIMG to VHD menu entry to
make a container for you.

When you want two OSes to run simultaneously (tradition VM
situation), then each OS needs a license. But if instead,
you're just multibooting, then the license issue is solved.

I generally like heterogenous VMs, because I need some
different capability. I might run Linux in a window, while
Windows is my main OS. Maybe there's some different program
that's in Linux but not Windows, or vice versa.

Running two copies of Windows 10 (one as a VM), while
I've done it, it's not really giving me a "new" capability.
But it can be used in situations where I need
"a bit of isolation". For really determined malware, there
is still a more-than-theoretical possibility of it escaping.
If you have a sample which is really virulent, a VM today
is simply not good enough to prevent a disaster.

You can install an OS in a VM and use the 30-day grace period.
Even Microsoft offers free VM images for users to download, with
this very idea in mind. The background image on the
desktop of these, even tells you how to do a re-arm :-)
Once you've used all your re-arms, you toss the container
file, prepare a fresh container... and re-install your programs.
Not many people really enjoy that idea. And when I run VMs
without a license, I generally don't keep them all that long,
and toss them after about three days or so. The idea is, I
may need to test something, and once the test is over, there's
not much point keeping it going.

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-u...vms/#downloads

On VirtualBox, those are .ova files. That's an appliance.
The .ova may unpack to the native VirtualBox container format,
and then you might have to convert it to .vhd . That will
waste a bit of time, but you won't lose too many brain
cells figuring out how to do that. You can add an empty
..vhd to the VM, install Macrium in the guest OS, and
clone the original container, over to the VHD. No problemo.
I use that technique, before "compacting" VHD files.
And VHD files can also be compacted in Disk Management
(look for "VDisk" in the documentation).

Paul

Paul wrote:

Yes wrote:
I'm thinking about buying and installing Win 10 Pro and then using
Win 10 Pro's VM feature to create several Win 10 VMs, e.g., one for
web surfing, another VM for gaming and a third for goofing around.

When I use Win 10 Pro's VM feature, do I have to supply a new Win 10
license to create and use a Win 10 VM or does the Win 10 Pro allow
you to make a Win 10 Pro VM with no additional licenses required?

Thanks,

John

Well, the first thing we have to agree on, is terminology.

A "typical" virtual machine situation, is you have a window
on your screen, with a second (guest) OS running inside that window.

That wouldn't be very good for gaming, because very few VM
environments give good access to the video card (Crysis won't
run at 30FPS). The best I ever used, was Connectix Virtual PC
for Mac, where a 3DFX card on the host, could be used for
gaming from the guest - directly. No driver interfered with
the path, and the guest sent writes to the GPU on the
card directly. The Mac of course, sucked for gaming, and
it still sucked with that special feature, but at least
their heart was in the right place. While VirtualBox
has "experimental DirectX support", that's not quite the
same thing.

But Windows 10 is supposed to have another capability.
And this isn't a virtual machine concept either. It
uses the container a virtual machine might use, but
without the overhead.

Normally, a user wanting to use several instances of the
same OS (same license key, only one running at a time), they
use separate boot drives for the OS instances.

But as I understand it, with Win10, there is some capability
to boot from a VHD file (a VM container). The BCD can have
its first reference, to a physical OS say, and the second
and third instances could be a VHD file with an OS inside it.
The same license key is entered in each one, and only
one of them can run at a time on the machine, so no rules
are broken. Rather than "wasting" a partition for each
OS, some of the OSes are merely images stored inside
a single VHD file. This means you could have a 1TB partition
and store fifty 20GB images, and have fifty slightly
different versions of the same OS. When you boot, the
boot menu has fifty lines in it, and you cursor down
to the one you want. And that OS takes over the machine.

And since I'm too lazy to go look for a Microsoft recipe,
I know the EasyBCD developer will have thought about
this one :-) The picture here at least acknowledges
the idea exists. So you can add VHD-contained OSes
to the boot menu with this. This beats doing it from
the command line, even if it only takes one BCDEdit
command.

https://neosmart.net/wiki/easybcd/po...es/vhd-images/

And if you need to move a physical OS, into a container
(that's called "P2V"), Sysinternals has a program for that.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sys...loads/disk2vhd

A second way to make a VHD, is use Macrium to backup to
MRIMG, and then Macrium has a MRIMG to VHD menu entry to
make a container for you.

When you want two OSes to run simultaneously (tradition VM
situation), then each OS needs a license. But if instead,
you're just multibooting, then the license issue is solved.

I generally like heterogenous VMs, because I need some
different capability. I might run Linux in a window, while
Windows is my main OS. Maybe there's some different program
that's in Linux but not Windows, or vice versa.

Running two copies of Windows 10 (one as a VM), while
I've done it, it's not really giving me a "new" capability.
But it can be used in situations where I need
"a bit of isolation". For really determined malware, there
is still a more-than-theoretical possibility of it escaping.
If you have a sample which is really virulent, a VM today
is simply not good enough to prevent a disaster.

You can install an OS in a VM and use the 30-day grace period.
Even Microsoft offers free VM images for users to download, with
this very idea in mind. The background image on the
desktop of these, even tells you how to do a re-arm :-)
Once you've used all your re-arms, you toss the container
file, prepare a fresh container... and re-install your programs.
Not many people really enjoy that idea. And when I run VMs
without a license, I generally don't keep them all that long,
and toss them after about three days or so. The idea is, I
may need to test something, and once the test is over, there's
not much point keeping it going.


https://developer.microsoft.com/en-u...vms/#downloads

On VirtualBox, those are .ova files. That's an appliance.
The .ova may unpack to the native VirtualBox container format,
and then you might have to convert it to .vhd . That will
waste a bit of time, but you won't lose too many brain
cells figuring out how to do that. You can add an empty
.vhd to the VM, install Macrium in the guest OS, and
clone the original container, over to the VHD. No problemo.
I use that technique, before "compacting" VHD files.
And VHD files can also be compacted in Disk Management
(look for "VDisk" in the documentation).

Paul

Thanks Paul. WRT gaming, I'm talking about RPG games ca. 2003. The
ones I have were designed for DX 9 graphics, such as Baldur's Gate.
I'll have to re-read your comments tomorrow after a good night's sleep
:-)

John

Yes wrote:


Thanks Paul. WRT gaming, I'm talking about RPG games ca. 2003. The
ones I have were designed for DX 9 graphics, such as Baldur's Gate.
I'll have to re-read your comments tomorrow after a good night's sleep
:-)

John

You may be able to find info on specific games.

https://www.gog.com/forum/baldurs_ga...e_2_windows_10

It's always possible for Windows 10 to work better with
particular games. At least, until the game calls for something
that simply cannot be emulated any more.

I would test the games first, before doing something else.

If you run Windows 7 as an option instead of Windows 10,
whether it's a Guest or Host, it'll need a license if
you expect it to run forever. OSes will run for the grace
period. Enterprise versions of OSes, may continue to
run after the grace period, but reboot after being used
for 30 minutes or something. The behavior at the end
of the grace period, varies a bit.

If you download a Windows 10 VM from Microsoft, those are
time-bombed. Earlier VMs they provided, would work on
any future calendar year without a problem. It's just the
Win10 ones that you may need to download fresher versions
of the VM on a future usage date.

Paul