Allow OS to be booted native or as VM?

[John_Leask]

I'd like to be able to boot a windows 7 or 8 partition as either the native OS, or else as a VM guest under windows 7. What's the best way to do this?

I currently run a windows 7 guest under a windows 7 host, but was wanting to add a new dual boot partition to the host, and allow this to also run as a VM under the existing host OS.

Habe people had any good results doing this? What would be the best setup for the new OS - windows 8 with a virtual hard disk? Are there any problems I'm likely to stumble over? Does it still need different hardware profiles for the OS?

I remember trying something similar a good while back, probably with workstation v4 or v5 and windows XP, and I know I had problems that caused me to give up with it - disk corruptions and such like...

Thanks for any advice...

[mfelker]

Many gurus like continuum have said that using a VM on a physical disk hardly improves performance.  Also if you read the documentation I'm not sure you could actually dual boot a physical VM with  a normall OS o natively on the drive.  I've been tempted to try creating a VM on  a physical hard drive but I'd  rather use the  partition n  space fro to storaage of  more  virtual VM's or  other datra.

[John_Leask]

I'm more interested in the ability to run a OS image both as a VM, and on the real hardware, depending on needs, rather than just running a VM using a physical instead of a virtual disk.

The performance boost would be from running natively on the hardware (all CPU's and memory, real display hardware).

I did do this briefly a number of years back with an earlier VMware version, but ran into problems. I'm wondering if it works any better now, especially as it looks like workstation now has the ability to boot a VM from a VHD file, and windows 7/8 can also boot a native OS from a VHD.

[continuum]

with a win7 host you can only run VMs if they use a different drive - using the same drive as the host only works with Linux or 2003 or XP

[John_Leask]

Different disks isn't an issue - I have multiple disks in my workstation, though at one point I think I was running a VM from the same disk as the OS - though that was a stabndard VMWare VM, rather than a VHD - is the 'not on same disk as host OS' issue specific to having the VM running from a VHD?

Has anyone recently had a VM set up so it can also run as a dual boot option on the native hardware? If so, what setup did you use, and how well did it work?

[continuum]

I regularly do this - but then I use 2003 as the host - not Windows 7

If you use a Win7 VM you may need to reactivate it because of the changed hardware - is this worth the effort ?

[WoodyZ]

JohnL wrote: Has anyone recently had a VM set up so it can also run as a dual boot option on the native hardware? If so, what setup did you use, and how well did it work?

If you want to have Windows 7 Host and dual boot Windows 7 Host and Windows 8 installed on a .VHD and then also be able to run the Windows 8 installed on the .VHD in VMware Player/Workstation then have a look at: Re: Dual Boot win 7 on pc+ Mac os on Vmware???

Although you may have WPA Issues to overcome/resolve.  Additionally you may not take Snapshots or Suspend the VM and then natively boot the .VHD file, so if you go this route be aware and cautious not to use those features in this use case scenario.