Virtual Server 2005 vs. Virtual PC 2004
OK, it's October 1st, did you get order your copy of Virtual Server yet? Supposedly today is the first day of General Availability. What that really means, I’m not quite sure since I get most of my software from my two MSDN subscriptions. I'm sure many of you too are waiting to see when/if it's available on MSDN while others who have used the beta might be looking for copies to buy for production use.
In either case, I wanted to post a few differences between the two products. The biggest difference is purpose.
Virtual PC is designed primarily for running desktop operating systems & applications in interactive mode. Can Virtual PC run server operating systems? Yes. Will Microsoft support you? No.
Virtual Server is designed to run server operating systems & server applications in daemon mode.
Other differences:
- Virtual PC supports sound. Virtual Server does not.
- Virtual Server provides support for SCSI disks (guest drives). Virtual PC does not.
- Virtual Server exposes a COM api (with .NET PIAs) for extensibility. Virutal PC does not.
- Virtual PC supports shared folders with the host. Virtual Server does not.
- Virtual Server supports running guest without an interative session (a daemon). Virtual PC does not.
Well that's a start for now.
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