In my blog post over on Amazon’s End User Blog, I related some of my experiences with the new version of Virtual PC that supports Windows 7 XP Mode (XPM), and how it compares to VMware Workstation with Unity view. Something that I forgot to mention is that although you can simultaneously run applications from multiple VPC VMs, you can’t start VMware Workstation while a VPC VM is running.  If you try, you get the following error message:

 
Click to enlarge

And in fact, if you already have a VMware VM running and you click on a VPC application in the Start menu, the VMware VM shuts down and you get that same error message. The VPC virtual application then starts up. So apparently VPC takes precedence over VMware in these scenarios. I guess maybe it has to do with both virtualization technologies not being able to utilize the hardware virtualization components (in this case, Intel VT) at the same time – but I’ll have to check further to verify that.

If you simply hibernate the VPC VM(s) – which is what the XPM VM is set to do by default when you click Close – you won’t be able to use VMware. If you set it to prompt you for an action on close and choose Turn Off, then you will be able to open your VMware virtual machines. I learned all this through trial and error, figured it might be useful information for those who have both VMware Workstation and VPC XPM installed.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com