Venu Anuganti Blog

If you want to install Vista as a guest Operating System on your existing OS, you can use any of the following technologies:

Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 (Workstation)
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 (Server OS)
VMWare (Workstation or server based on VMWare workstation or server product)

Microsoft Virtual PC 2004:

You can find a nice posting from Anand Iyer a developer of Microsoft on how to install Vista on Microsoft Virtual PC 2004.

Microsoft Virtual Server 2005:

I tried to install Vista BETA1 on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 standard edition, but could not able to do that instead I broke my 2003 server host.

Here is the steps that I did to install Vista on Virtual Server 2005:

Downloaded the Virtual Server 2005 Standard Edition from MSDN (subscribed one)
Installed it on my Windows 2003 Server SP1 (Dell Prec 470 – Dual Xeon with HT (acts as 4 CPU), 80GB, 1GB SDRAM, 128 ATI FireGL 3100)
Created a Virtual Machine of size 20GB with 256 RAM
Configured the Vista Virual Machine CD-DVD Drive to use the Vista ISO image. You need to copy the ISO image co-located to Virtual additions ISO
Configured the Virtual Server 2005 RMVC on port 1025
Started the Vista Virtual machine
Connected to this Virtual machine using the VMRC client using the connecting string as http://localhost:1025/ and immediately I can see the BIOS and VISTA installer loading
Once the installer blue screen is running, pressed ‘Shift+F10″ and got the command prompt
Now using diskpart created a primary NTFS partition on the whole 20GB virtual disk
After the partition is done, restarted the Virtual machine by resetting it and turning it off
After the restart, I can see the installer screen back..good so far
But now when I click on “Install Now” button, it rebounces to the same screen again and again
So, tried to use ISO mount (using Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel to a drive Z: ) and pointed RMVC client to use that physical drive; but still no luck. Same problem, the installer screen reappears back to install now dialog every time you click on Install Vista button.
So, gave up on installing Vista on Virtual Server 2005.

Now, I decided to get rid of Virtual Server completely on my system as its not working to install Vista, and uninstalled the same. Even though it did not ask me to reboot, I did to have my clean system back. But it is not booting any more. Even though the boot image loads after that instead of loading the OS, the system recycles back to bios and the process continues like that for ever.

Now booted with 2003 installer CD, and I can see that the disk is now labelled with unpartioned…hmmmm. My guess is, the partition creation that I did within virtual machine might have caused this problem. Must be a bug from Virtual Server when using Vista. Anyway, with this I needed to reinstall the OS as there is no other option left nor I can fix it as the 2003 CD installer also could not identify any existing OS on that disk. I am still trying to get this 2003 server up2date.