Hyper-V 64 with Win7 Enterprise 64 as guest

Question

I am building a new machine to be my single machine. My main workstation would be a Windows 7 64 bits for .Net development. I do a lot of WPF stuff, so having access to the video card is desirable.

Would I have losses by having this as a VM on Hyper-V 2008 64 bits?

I would not think so but I would like to double-check here.

I am planning to have the following:

1) Windows 7 64bit: Main workstation/Developer machine (VS2010, .Net 4...) - I will live here 80% of the time
2) Windows XP 32bit: Win16 and Win32 development with Delphi (yes, I occasionally do some pretty old stuff for clients, if they need to)
3) Server 2008 64bit: SQL Server 2008
4) Server 2008 64bit: SQL Server 2008 (to practice fail over, log shipping, etc)
5) Ubuntu 32bit: leisure browsing on murky websites

But if running Windows 7 on Hyper-V will result in limiting the functionality, limiting directly accessing the video card, etc, I could live with a stand-alone installation of Windows 7.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You will have video card (DirectX) problems with this construction.

An alternative solution:

• Main OS: Windows 7 x64
• Windows Virtual PC + Virrtual XP (not MS Virtual PC! homepage - it is a 32 bit, seamless integrated virtual xp)
• server 2008 on different computers or with virtualbox / Microsoft Virtual PC

Answer 2

Your main issue with doing this is going to be the video card. HyperV guests do not support DirectX10 and can often have issues running the Aero interface (if that bothers you?). HyperV also has some problems with high end graphics cards - see here.

I'm not intimately familiar with WPF and its performance requirements, or whether it needs directX, so it may very well work in this situation, but I don't believe your going to get the best performance out of your graphics card, so make sure you test first.