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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