Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years and 5 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

I’ve been playing around with Microsoft’s free Virtual PC 2007 product at work lately in an attempt to keep an old Visual FoxPro 3.0 application running on newer hardware. This particular application refuses to run on any machine with more than 256mb of physical RAM. That’s right, 256 megabytes. Needless to say this is not really feasible in today’s computing environment, but legacy apps need to be supported. Placing the app into a virtual machine seemed to be a good solution: the VM runs on the user’s current modern hardware, but can simulate the 256mb of RAM required by FoxPro.

Setting up a Virtual PC is incredibly easy. The wizard walks you through the initial setup (location of the virtual hard drive file, memory allocation, etc.) and then it “boots” and you install the OS like you would on a fresh PC. For my FoxPro app, I installed Windows XP SP3 from our slipstreamed CD. All of the hardware (CPU, network adapters, USB devices, etc.) from the local machine running Virtual PC are available to the VM. Once the install was done, I configured the VM like any other PC on the corporate network: joined it to the domain, installed the basic corporate utilities, and then finally copied over FoxPro. It works great and is a lot faster than running it on the old Pentium II 350MHz machine the user was running the app on before.

For fun, I even created a VM running the latest Ubuntu 8.10 release:

This has got me thinking … what other cool things could I do with virtualization? Hmmm …