Virtual backup and virtual machines

Mware and Microsoft have been offering several solutions to run virtual machines at no charge and if you are a newbie to virtual machines it may be a good idea to inform yourself about the advantages of each product before installing it.

It turns out, VMware was actually first and now offers its servers for free as well, but Microsoft has entered the market and offers some serious alternatives.

Hyper-V is a competent competitor and challenges VMware because it can run more reliable live backups to be taken using Microsoft's Volume Shadow Service. So if you are a Pro and want to run virtual guests 24/7, Microsoft may be the solution for you.

For people who want to experiment with Linux, Microsoft offers Virtual PC which works under XP and above and can be downloaded from Microsoft's Download Center.

It doesn't give you as many features, yet it allows users who run Windows 7 to start their old programs straight on their desktop. You can actually see your old app inside a Windows 7 window, as if it is running on Windows 7! Those who are used to opening remote desktop or VNC to view their VM's desktop are very glad to have this new feature, but it only works under Windows 7.

virtual backup is simple tech from today's perspective. Virtual Server is a little more advanced and provides a website for admins to install and monitor multiple virtual computers concurrently. It also surprises with a x64 emulation, which isn't found in Microsoft Virtual PC.

A detriment of virtual PC and virtual sever is their single CPU processor limitation. In the past, VMware was the leader and already offered technology to make use of all CPU cores and processors.

Microsoft has caught up with VMware and offers this functionality in Hyper-V.

In addition, another new feature in Hyper-V is that you can have a VM write to the host's hard drive directly and turn off the VHD mechanism. Hence you do not have to have VHD files at all and the disk read/write speeds are phenomenal.

Reading directly from the raw disk is a major performance boost and should be considered if you want to run several disk hungry virtual machines.

While Hyper-V is powerful, it has a downside as well: it requires either Windows Server 2008 or the stripped down version Hyper-V Server 2008 which is free but needs to be installed as a separate OS.

The OS independent solution is VMware because it runs on all operating systems but isn't as efficient with backups.

In short, VMware is powerful but difficult to use, Virtual PC is basic, Virtual Server is medium ground, and Hyper-V is Microsoft's alternative to VMware.