How to run virtual machines on top of Windows 7?

Question

I have a couple of Windows 2000 Virtual machines. The virtual machine built into Windows 7 runs WinXP VMs fine, but anything previous to that...the experience is pretty crappy (for one, integration components won't install).

How does one run VMs on Win7 x64? I looked up Virtual PC 2007 and it says Win7 is not supported (Vista is though).

Anyone have experience with this?

Answer 1

While VirtualBox is highly recommended, you can still get Virtual PC for windows 7: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx

Answer 2

VirtualBox is an excellent tool. Open source and support most OS. There is an open source version as well as a free/paid version (with some closed source features). The license is very generous even for commercial use.

Answer 3

You can use third-party software to run a larger number of virtual machine variants. Take a look at something like VMWare Workstation -- it runs on Windows 7 and can run all kind of OS variants in its hypervisor.

VMWare makes a tool called VMWare vCenter Converter than can convert Microsoft Hyper-V VMs to the VMWare format. It's free to use the standalone converter if you don't want support.

Answer 4

As well with VMWare, as said before, I highly recommend Virtualbox. It is open source, has a good community, and good additions in order to control your VM better. It works with any system.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, OS/2, and OpenBSD.

EDIT by enedene:
Virtualbox is great, it's free, but only OSE version is open source. OSE lacks USB support. I use it all the time and can confirm it's great, however I'm not sure about windows2000 support, that needs to be checked, winXP works fine.