How to virtualise your PC for free

David Fearon | Oct 28, 2008 4:43 PM

David Fearon explains how to save energy and hassle by converting your old Windows XP PC to a virtual one that you can run on your Vista machine

We’re going to use the wonders of virtualisation to solve an age-old dilemma: how to deal with the transition from an old PC to a new one.

There are two philosophical viewpoints here. You can either just start from scratch, ignoring the old machine and basking in the glow of a new, clean installation of Windows that doesn’t have all the accumulated paraphernalia of your old one slowing it down.

Or you go for a sort of messy replication process, using the likes of Vista’s Easy Transfer Wizard to port your OS setup, and a third-party application (Laplink’s PCmover) to transfer your applications across. The former of those has its drawbacks – you go to use a tool or shortcut you’ve become familiar with and it’s not there; or you suddenly want to use an application you’ve not re-installed on the new PC. The second has the obvious drawback that your lovely new PC will soon be bursting at the seams with old stuff you probably don’t need.

There is a third way, however: virtualise the old PC, turning a physical computer into a software one. With a virtual copy of your old PC installed on a new one, the exact state of the machine is replicated and you can use it full-screen as though you were sitting in front of the old PC. But all of the accumulated software junk is kept encapsulated in the virtual machine image.

When you want to switch back to your super-fast new PC, just shut down the virtual one. You don’t even need to fully shut it down – you can pause the virtual machine, saving its complete state to disk, allowing you to bring it back to life again from exactly where you left off in a few seconds.

How to do it

First, you need to pour your original PC’s software state into a virtual machine. Second, transfer that state to the new PC, and third, install and configure the virtual machine environment to run it in.

Virtualising the old PC is done with the VMware Converter tool, which you can download from www.vmware.com/products/converter. It's free, but you’ll need to enter your details and some information about your intended use. Converter sucks the complete contents of your main system partition off your hard disk, down to the cluster level.

You won’t need to worry about reinstalling anything at the other end. You’ll end up with a single virtual machine disk file. The secondary beauty of this is that you can then just make two copies of that file and archive one off wherever you like, keeping it preserved forever if you want.

VMware Converter will let you copy the image to an external hard disk or over the network. Running the converter is simplicity itself: just install and start it up on the PC you want to virtualise, run through the wizards and change a few of the default options. See the walkthrough above for the complete process.

Once the machine has been made virtual, use VMware’s free virtual machine software to run it on your new PC. The free VM utility is called VMware Server, but don’t let the name put you off. It’ll cope with a standard non-server Windows XP installation without a murmur.

Hiccups

All virtual machine systems run by executing the software from the old physical machine on an extra software layer of their own, abstracting the physical hardware from the operating system.

The OS itself runs on a complete software emulation of a real PC’s hardware – you’ll see this when you boot up the virtual machine in a window and get greeted by a BIOS screen before Windows loads. This has a few consequences. When you first boot your virtualised PC, Windows will start up and find itself apparently running on new hardware. That means you’ll get the standard Windows messages and pop-up dialogs, informing you that Windows has found new hardware and is trying to find drivers.

Because the VMware-emulated hardware is designed to be generic, Windows should soon sort itself out and install generic drivers. The only potential problem is that it’s possible that the Windows Activation process may kick in if your installation deems itself to be running on significantly different hardware. If you’ve used the default setup that shouldn’t be a problem – networking is likely to be functional and you can re-activate over the internet. Failing that, you may have to call the re-activation phone number for an activation code.

In addition, you’ll find the graphics drivers will result in slow screen updates and a sluggish mouse. To cure that you need to install the VMware Tools from within the virtual machine itself. Again, see the walkthrough we’ve provided.

Communicating between virtual and physical machines

One thing you need to remember when you have your old machine running as a virtual image is that it doesn’t ‘know’ about it. It’s not aware there’s another operating system (your new PC), upon which it’s running. That means there’s no natural path of access between the physical and virtual machines: you can’t ordinarily access folders on the physical machine or vice versa. VMware Tools does include facilities to share folders between real and virtual machines, but we’ve found them slightly unreliable.

The easiest way to share files between host and guest operating system is in fact to use networking. Just share the folders you need access to on both machines and you can read and write to them over the network interface easily.

If you’re having trouble with networking and need to get files from host to guest, a simple – albeit less than elegant – way to share between the real and virtual machine is to ‘capture’ a USB flash drive before you start the virtual machine. To do that, with the VM powered down in VMware Server, select VM | Removable devices | USB devices and select the drive. When you start up the virtual machine, you can then transfer files to the drive. When you shut it down again, the drive gets given back to the host and you can copy the files into the host OS.

Performance

With the hardware virtualisation features built into modern CPUs, you’ll probably be pleasantly surprised that virtual machines can run almost as fast as native hardware. The exception to that is 3D graphics: you can’t play DirectX games via a virtual machine using VMware Server since there’s no built-in way for a VM to natively access the hardware.

And finally

Being a server app, the VMware Server Console acts differently to a normal local app. Remember that the Console (the main interface window in Server) is a front end through which to connect to and access virtual machines. The machines themselves run independently.

That means quitting the Server Console app won’t stop virtual machines running; they’ll continue in the background, taking up CPU resources and as much physical RAM as you’ve allocated in the virtual machine’s setup options. If you find your physical machine running slowly, you’ve probably forgotten to shut a VM down. You need to suspend or shut down any virtual machines via the Console before you exit the Console.

If you accidentally close the Console before you’ve powered down a VM, don’t worry, the VM isn’t lost: fire up the console again and you can reconnect to it and shut down normally.

1

Load up VMware Converter on your old PC. You’ll get a message asking if you have an enterprise licence. Just click ‘Continue in starter mode’. The main interface window is task-based, which is useful for running in enterprise mode. From the File menu, select New | Convert... to start up the Conversion wizard.

Click Next in the wizard to get through the start-up welcome screen, and Next again to proceed to the Source Type selection. Since we’re converting a real PC, just make sure ‘Physical Computer’ is selected, and hit Next to get to the Source Login page. In this context, the source is the PC you want to virtualise.

On the Source Login dialog, simply check ‘This local machine’ to indicate you want to virtualise the machine you’re sitting at rather than one on the network. This handily greys out the username and password boxes, so you won’t need to worry about domains and such like.

In the Source Data screen, select disks you want to convert. If you have disks that are purely used for data or backup, uncheck these – you only want to convert the operating system and application files. Make sure ‘Ignore page file and hibernation file’ is checked.

In the Destination Type screen, choose ‘Other Virtual Machine’ and hit Next. Type a name for the new VM, and browse to a location to save the files. In the ‘Type of virtual machine to create’, make sure you click the option to run under VMware Server 1.x.

Now choose your disk allocation options. ‘Allow virtual disk files to expand’ is the best option. The next screen concerns network configuration: leaving it ‘bridged’ is usually the best option. In the next screen, check the option to remove System Restore checkpoints.

Review your options and then hit Finish to start the transfer. Once the process has finished, you’ll find a folder with a VMware virtual disk file containing the disk image, and a small file of a few kilobytes of configuration data. You now need to import that into VMware Server to bring it to life.

Download VMware Server (www.vmware.com/products/server), choosing ‘VMware Server for Windows operating systems’. Once you’ve installed Server on your new PC, start it up and just click ‘Open Existing Virtual Machine’, go to the folder containing the converted machine and click on the VMX file.

It makes sense to review the configuration of the virtual machine. Click VM | Settings. The main ones of interest are the memory and number of processors. The more memory you allocate to the virtual machine, the less the physical one will have to play with. If it’s a Windows XP machine, 368-512MB is usually enough.

Now click on the Play button to power up the machine. You should soon find yourself looking at a copy of Windows running in a window. Click in the window to move the virtual PC’s mouse and use its keyboard; hit to release them back to the host.

Now you need to install VMware drivers. In the VMware Server menu bar, click VM | Install VMware Tools... to install a virtual CD-ROM into the virtual machine. The virtual CD-ROM should autoplay within the Windows installation. Just follow the installation through.

Once the tools are installed, you should find graphics performance is smoother and the mouse no longer has a sluggish response. You’ll also find you can transparently switch between the host and guest operating system just by moving the mouse across.

This article appeared in the November, 2008 issue of PC Authority.