Experience Level:: I'm an ESXi expert but know almost nothing about Workstation. I purchased Workstation 6 and got a free upgrade to 6.5. I set up one VM of Windows 2000 Server that our accounting is on and the accountant can call into. I've simply been clicking the VM shortcut button since 2008 to launch the VM. I've heard of unity, but don't completely understand it. I also know nothing about XP mode other than what I have seen in an on-line video. I know it is possible to install both Workstation and Windows XP Mode, but both cannot be active at the same time.
The situation: I have a new Dell laptop, M6600 w/i7 and Windows 7 64 Pro. My old laptop has XP Pro 32. I hae a development environment I use that is 32 bit but also uses some 16 bit utilities. They do have newer versions of the software, but it is less productive, and the old software generates 32 and 64 bit apps more efficiently, with fewer bugs, and run far faster than my Microsoft .NET languages. As a result, I maintain approximately 3 million lines of code in this language. I don't need to tell anyone what it's like to try to maintain current information in two places, and never have what you need with you, so I want to move everything to the new laptop. I need to be able to do P2V and bring in customer servers to prototype network changes before rolling them out. My ESXi boxes are across the VPN, so I need to do it locally, and my laptop is what I bring to customers. The new laptop has an i7 quad with 32 gigs of RAM, 1 1/4 TB of drive space made up of a Crucial M4 512GB SSD, and Seagate Momentus 750, and has eSata 3 and USB 3 ports. The VMs will be Windows Servers, Unix Servers, and sometimes ESXi with UNIX VMs under it, which I know will be slow under the virtualized ESXi.
Thoughts: When first reading it sounded like XP Mode would be completely transparent and that theh C drive of the XP Mode was the C drive of the host. I've since read that is not the case, and that it's simply a VM with its own virtual hard drive. I did learn that when you install an app in XP Mode, it shows up on the Windows 7 64 start menu, and when you launch it, the app runs in a window on the Windows 7 desktop, almost like it was an Windows 7 native app. That would be nice instead of dealing with another desktop. Workstation says that it can import the XP Mode VM, but can only run one copy at a time. I thought bummer, as I would need to run more than one old app at a time, but then I thought about it, and I'm guessing in XP mode, they are simply running more than one app out of the same VM with XP Mode also. If I could get the same integrated behavior from Workstation 8 that I can with XP Mode, then I would mirror the OS drive of the new computer to a spare drive, install XP mode, copy off the VM, re-install the original drives, set up Workstation 8, import the vhd into Workstation, and delete the vhd. Then I wouldn't need to have two virtual environments whch cannot play together.
Questions:
1. With Workstation 8, can I have apps on the start menu of Windows 7 64 that launch inside of a VM, without showing the desktop of the guest operating system, like I can with Windows XP Mode? If the answer is yes, can it launch automatically launch the VM where the app resides?
2. If the answers to 1 are yes, there does Windows XP Mode have any advantages for me that Workstation 8 doesn't?
Thanks TONS!
