vpc hardware & performance

We're looking at replacing several of our old, out-of-warranty, servers with
a new server that can run virtual pc. These servers are currently
configured with XP and run a home built app that is targeted to run on XP.
We'd like to replace several of our old servers with 1 new workhorse server
that can run multiple virtual pc clients.

I was thinking the optimal solution will be to purchase a new HyperV server
with a lot of ram and run Virtual PC. I have a couple of questions about
that and appreciate any advice I can get.

- VPC 2007 runs on Windows 2003 as a host system, but VPC only runs on a
host system of Windows 7. Will I have any problems installing Windows 7 on
a server - say a HP Proliant DL 360 G6, 2-quad core's and 16 GB ram. Will
that server be on Windows 7's HAL?
- Assuming I do go forward with the HP server mentioned above, how can I
determine how many virtual pc's I can install on that box?
- Wouldn't I want to install Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 as the host OS
on this server? If I do, then I'm assuming I can't install VPC, and I
instead need to install VPC 2007, correct?
- One of the items that has been raised is whether each virtual pc will get
the same performance, or could they potentially bottleneck each other. Is
there any information available on this?

Any other help available to a relative vpc newby is appreciated.

Thanks, Andre

inline

On Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:14:13 -0700, "Andre" <> wrote:

>We're looking at replacing several of our old, out-of-warranty, servers with
>a new server that can run virtual pc. These servers are currently
>configured with XP and run a home built app that is targeted to run on XP.
>We'd like to replace several of our old servers with 1 new workhorse server
>that can run multiple virtual pc clients.
>
>I was thinking the optimal solution will be to purchase a new HyperV server
>with a lot of ram and run Virtual PC. I have a couple of questions about
>that and appreciate any advice I can get.
>
>- VPC 2007 runs on Windows 2003 as a host system, but VPC only runs on a
>host system of Windows 7. Will I have any problems installing Windows 7 on
>a server - say a HP Proliant DL 360 G6, 2-quad core's and 16 GB ram. Will
>that server be on Windows 7's HAL?

VPC 2007 runs on more than just Windows 2003. VPC2007 is not
supported in production on a W2K3 server, only client OSes (Windows
Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Ultimate,
Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Windows Vista
Service Pack 1 (SP1) (Enterprise, Business, Ultimate), and Windows XP
Service Pack 3 (SP3)).

Why run a client OS on a server? VPC is not the best solution for
running VMs as a server. If you want to stick with Windows 2003 for
the host OS, you should look at Virtual Server 2005.


>- Assuming I do go forward with the HP server mentioned above, how can I
>determine how many virtual pc's I can install on that box?

This really depends on what your VMs are doing and how much memory
they need and how much memory your server has. With 16GB, you could
run quite a few XP VMs, but if they are very CPU dependent, that will
be your limitation over memory.

>- Wouldn't I want to install Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 as the host OS
>on this server? If I do, then I'm assuming I can't install VPC, and I
>instead need to install VPC 2007, correct?

No. Hyper-V is a virtualizaiton tool also. You dont' run VPC on top
of Hyper-V. Hyper-V allows you to run XP VMs.

>- One of the items that has been raised is whether each virtual pc will get
>the same performance, or could they potentially bottleneck each other. Is
>there any information available on this?

It really depends on what you're doing with your VMs. Are they using
a lot of disk, CPU, RAM, network I/O?
You need to have an idea of what your VMs are doing before you can
determine a bottleneck. It's mostly common sense, if your VMs
generally use 90% of a CPU, then that's your bottleneck, you'll want
to limit the number of VMs to N-1 cores, i.e. if you have 2 quads,
you'd probably only be able to run.

>
>Any other help available to a relative vpc newby is appreciated.
>
>Thanks, Andre

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

Thanks for the reply.

Our main reason for wanting to do this is for consolidation in our rack. We
effectively have a virtual office, and all of our servers are at a colo. As
I mentioned, we have several older servers running XP that serve as
workstations. We'd essentially like to replace them with a new server that
can run multiple vm's. Since we want XP as the OS on the vm's, are we
better off looking at one of the other vm softwares out there? If we do go
with Windows server, it will be 2008. Thanks again.

Andre

On Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:24:00 -0700, "Andre" <> wrote:

>Thanks for the reply.
>
>Our main reason for wanting to do this is for consolidation in our rack. We
>effectively have a virtual office, and all of our servers are at a colo. As
>I mentioned, we have several older servers running XP that serve as
>workstations. We'd essentially like to replace them with a new server that
>can run multiple vm's. Since we want XP as the OS on the vm's, are we
>better off looking at one of the other vm softwares out there? If we do go
>with Windows server, it will be 2008. Thanks again.
>

So you want to have XP workstations virtualized. That is just fine,
but you have to consider how your people will access these virtual
machines..

How do you do today (since you have a virtual office)?
Are people already today remoting in to the workstations, which are on
different physical PC:s yet sit in a rack in your server room?
In that case putting them as virtual machines on a good size server
will not change the user connection one bit and you will be fine with
Hyper-V. :-)

Strange thing though, if you remote into a XP workstation using Remote
Desktop, then effectively you have to assign each person *two* PC:s,
one physical at their desk running the RDP client and one virtual
machine where the real action is happening. Is this what you are
doing?

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

Yes, we currently Remote Desktop into the servers/xp boxes at the colo. We
all have our main physical workstation at home. From there we vpn to the
colo and rd to any of the servers or xp workstations. Currently we know
that user1 can rd to pc 1-3 and user2 can rd to pc 4,5. In the new scenario
I would imagine that 2 users will rd to the server, and each will pull up
virtual pc and launch the vm's that belong to them. Do you see any issues
with this? Would this be a server running Win 2008 and virtual pc 2007 or
some other scenario? Thanks again, this is all kind of new to me so I
appreciate the insight.

Andre

On Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:56:42 -0700, "Andre" <> wrote:

>Yes, we currently Remote Desktop into the servers/xp boxes at the colo. We
>all have our main physical workstation at home. From there we vpn to the
>colo and rd to any of the servers or xp workstations. Currently we know
>that user1 can rd to pc 1-3 and user2 can rd to pc 4,5. In the new scenario
>I would imagine that 2 users will rd to the server, and each will pull up
>virtual pc and launch the vm's that belong to them. Do you see any issues
>with this? Would this be a server running Win 2008 and virtual pc 2007 or
>some other scenario? Thanks again, this is all kind of new to me so I
>appreciate the insight.
>
>Andre

why do you want to use VPC2007? it's not a server product and lacks
most of the management and abilities that a VM server solution would

If you're going to be using Windows 2008, you should use the included
Hyper-V, its a much more robust VM solution.

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

That's why I came here asking for help - I'm not really sure what the best
solution is.
We would like to replace several servers in our rack, that run XP, with 1
new one, and be able to run virtual XP clients on them. What do you
recommend as the best solution for this?

Andre

On Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:03:11 -0400, "Bob Campbell" <>
wrote:

>"Andre" <> wrote in message
>news:...
>> That's why I came here asking for help - I'm not really sure what the best
>> solution is.
>> We would like to replace several servers in our rack, that run XP, with 1
>> new one, and be able to run virtual XP clients on them. What do you
>> recommend as the best solution for this?
>
>Well, XP machines in a rack are not actually "servers". But whatever.
>
>I just recently evaluated Server 2008 R2 and Hyper V as a replacement for
>Windows 7 (and Vista before that) and VPC 2007 running XP/Vista VMs and a
>Server 2003/SQL Server 2005 VM.
>
>I work from home, doing software development work for a large company.
>Windows 7 has overall better performance than Vista on my main machine, so I
>see slightly better performance of my VPC 2007VMs. I am running a Core 2
>Quad system with 8 GB RAM.
>
>After I got Server 2008 installed and configued, the first thing I wanted to
>try was Hyper V. It does give better performance than VPC 2007, but it
>comes with its own problems. There is no sound in the VMs, and the video
>modes are even more restricted than VPC 2007. The Hyper V emulated video
>card is only 4 megs of video RAM (VPC 2007 is 16 meg), so there are no
>widescreen modes. This is probably fine for "server apps", which is what
>Hyper V is designed for. If you want to run client type apps that benefit
>from more screen space (like my use of Visual Studio for dev work, etc.)
>then this is a real problem.
>
>My plan was to use Server 2008 as the base OS, and install SQL Server 2008
>on that. Currently I am using a Server 2003 VM with SQL Server 2005 as my
>DB server. Going with Server 2008 would eliminate one VM, since I wouldn't
>need the Server 2003 VM any longer. I would be running XP/Vista/7 VMs for
>development and testing, and not need a server VM.
>
>I may still do this, if I can get used to the small video modes that Hyper V
>gives your VMs. I would have better performance but smaller screens, PLUS
>no sound. The sound is nice because I currently get an audible alert when
>I get an email or an instant message from someone on the company network
>that I am always VPNed into on one of the VMs.
>
>Everything is always a trade off. God I wish MS would release a VPC 2010
>(or whatever they want to call it) with better performance than VPC 2007 but
>still have the "client stuff" like sound and USB and good video modes! The
>Windows 7 VPC for XP thing is not a good solution.

If you connect to your servers on Hyper-V via RDP you get wide-screen
modes, sound, etc. The only thing you don't is 32bit color, which for
servers isn't a bit need.

>If you want the best performance then go with Server 2008 R2 and Hyper V.
>If you need better video modes then I would go with 64 bit Windows 7 (for
>the CPU and RAM support) and install 64 bit VPC 2007, and leave Hyper V
>disabled (which is the default). I am assuming, of course, that VPC 2007
>will install on Server 2008 R2. I see no reason why it would not. It may
>be "unsupported" but still work just fine.
>


--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

On Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:57:58 -0700, "Andre" <> wrote:

>That's why I came here asking for help - I'm not really sure what the best
>solution is.
>We would like to replace several servers in our rack, that run XP, with 1
>new one, and be able to run virtual XP clients on them. What do you
>recommend as the best solution for this?
>
>Andre

Windows 2008x64+Hyper-V (HV)would be the most current MS solution.
Windows 2003x64+Virtual Server(VS) would probably be the next best MS
solution.

I would avoid using Virtual PC for a "server.
1. All VMs run off of 1 core of a CPU, creating a huge CPU bottleneck.
--HV and VS will use your other CPU/cores.

2. VPC 2007 doesn't run as a service, you must have a user logged in
to launch VMs.
--HV and VS run as a service and will automatically start VMs how you
want, and also don't automatically provide a GUI display reducing your
VM's footprint.

3. IIRC, VPC2007 will not be able to use 16GB of RAM for VMs. I
believe 8GB is what all can handle. It's not really important since
you've got all your VMs running off 1 core

IMHO, you're wasting that big HP server if you're going to try to run
VMs with VPC.

For non-MS, VMWare ESX or the free Server product would also be a
better solution for your needs.

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

Thanks for all the replies. Let me see if I can explain the server/xp in a
rack question. A few years ago we replaced some of our Dell 1U servers.
Rather than tossing the old 1U servers, 1850's I think, we had an idea of
installing XP on them and using them as spare pc's. Since they're in the
same rack as all of our data, this made sense - especially since we're all
working remotely. So even though XP was not designed to be installed on a
Dell 1850, we tried it, and it worked.

Now as we've purchased other servers our rack is filling up, so we had a
thought of pulling out around 5 of these old 1U servers. We figured we
could replace them with one new 1U server and just run virtual pc's on it.
So that's where the research and questions began, such as what host OS do we
install on the server and what virtual software do we install.

I'm currently using MS VPC 2007 on my Vista box and it works great. So I
immediately thought about the new Microsoft Virtual PC, but according to the
specs it's not designed to be installed on a server OS, such as Windows
2008. I don't really care about not having sound as all we want to do is RD
to this new server, and launch 1-n Virtual PC sessions, running XP. Those
Virtual PCs will serve as workstations to fire off our in-house application.
The reason we'd like to have multiple Virtual PC's is the app doesn't really
work very well when running multiple instances on the same box, so having
multiple Virtual PC's is a more desireable option.

I appreciate all the feedback as this has given me some good information.

Thanks, Andre