Supported Host and Guest Operating Systems
Virtual PC allows multiple guest operating systems to run virtualized on a single physical host. Although a number of popular host and guest operating systems lack official Microsoft support, there are sometimes few, if any, technical obstacles impeding installation. Instead, a configuration may be unsupported due to Microsoft's own licensing restrictions, or a decision to focus testing and support resources elsewhere, especially when production use of a legacy product fades.
A program manager on Microsoft's core virtualization team explains what official support entails:
With each release of Virtual PC we spend a significant amount of time trying to decide which (guest) operating system should be officially supported. While Virtual PC is capable of running many operating systems, official support for an operating system means that we will test it thoroughly, not ship Virtual PC if an issue exists with that operating system, and provide full support for customers who encounter problems while running these operating systems under Virtual PC. —Ben Armstrong, "Virtual PC Guy"As a product positioned for desktop use, Virtual PC provides official support for a different set of operating systems than its server-oriented counterpart, Microsoft Virtual Server and the more advanced Hyper-V. While the latter products support a range of server operating systems, Virtual PC 2007 supports only one variety as host and another as guest; its successor, Windows Virtual PC, supports none. And, whereas Virtual Server and Hyper-V have officially supported select Linux guests since 2006 and 2008, respectively, as of 2009, no Microsoft release of Virtual PC has officially supported Linux. Nonetheless, a number of Linux distributions do run successfully in Virtual PC 2007, and can be used with the Virtual Machine Additions from Virtual Server (see below). Lastly, while 64-bit host support was introduced with Virtual PC 2007, no release has been able to virtualize a 64-bit guest; Microsoft has thus far reserved this functionality for Hyper-V, which runs only on 64-bit (x64) editions of Windows Server 2008.
Read more about this topic: Windows Virtual PC
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—Fred M. Rogers, U.S. writer and host of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. “That Which is Essential Is Invisible to the Eye,” Young Children (July 1994)
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