Which versions of Windows 10 can be installed on a VHD

cereberus · 05 Oct 2021

jimbo45 said:

I can't think of ANY version of Windows -- even as far back as Windows 95 that can't be installed on a vhd. Of course your CPU and other hardware must be capable of supporting the VM in question -- but it's even possible (providing your CPU is 64 bit capable) to install a 64 Bit OS on a 32 bit running physical OS -- Many times I got a W7 x-64 VM running on an XP installed machine. !!

(OK limits of course - both GUEST and HOST combined are limited to 4GB RAM however much physical RAM is in the system).

I assume that people are using some VM software rather than directly trying to boot a VHD via ViBoot etc.-- if that's not true and people want to boot directly from a VHD such as via a mechanism like ViBoot then just ignore this post.

Cheers
jimbo

OP wants to natively boot directly from VHD. This is a great way of dual booting an alternative Windows OS as well as main host, without having to set up additional fixed size partitions. I do it all the time.

Hopachi · 07 Oct 2021

ricardobohner said:

Oh, good to know.
Would a virtual machine installed with hyper-V be based on real hardware rather than simulated hardware?

This would still be simulated / virtual hardware.
Important though: The CPU would be real and your storage disks too, if you use real disks in VM. So this will be at native performance level.

The motherboard and other components are simulated, like on VMWare Workstation, the only difference is the that Hyper-V is a type-1 hypervisor with direct access to your host hardware. The virtual hardware is kept to a bare minimum for better performance, to reduce overhead. Hence the (poor / basic) virtual graphics, among other things, isn't the same as your native GPU.

jimbo45 · 07 Oct 2021

Hopachi said:

This would still be simulated / virtual hardware.
Important though: The CPU would be real and your storage disks too, if you use real disks in VM. So this will be at native performance level.

The motherboard and other components are simulated, like on VMWare Workstation, the only difference is the that Hyper-V is a type-1 hypervisor with direct access to your host hardware. The virtual hardware is kept to a bare minimum for better performance, to reduce overhead. Hence the (poor / basic) virtual graphics, among other things, isn't the same as your native GPU.

Hi there
With TYPE 1 HYPERVISORS you can pass thru real hardware to the VM (it's a bit fiddly and you have to have the correct hardware) so that the VM can run at almost Native speed using the Native OS and almost zero overhead from the HOST OS.

Typically though VM's use a lot of "Paravirtualisation" so that the essentially "emulated" hardware from the "Virtual BIOS" can run on a variety of machines without change making copy and moving VM's between devices almost seamless. The penalty for that is of course in performance --For example an efficient VM running on HYPER-V with a load of real hardware will blow any VMWare or VBOX system out of the water.

Even if you can't get a load of passthru hardware -- it's always better if you can to attach things like HDD's to the VM as "Native devices" as the VM's own OS Disk I/O and file system will run far better than having to use "Virtual Hard Disks". Note though the OS itself must be on a Virtual hard disk but using things like GRUB it is possible to boot up a native Windows partition. Something like this :

insmod part_gpt
insmod chain
set root=(hd0,gpt1)
chainloader /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
boot

Use a tiny OS as the VM and then mess around with GRUB. You need to allocate the hardware of course. "Not for the fainthearted" but if you have time - worth playing with. Note please backup all your relevant systems and data before doing this !!!!

Cheers
jimbo

ricardobohner · 07 Oct 2021

thank you guys