Program to Load Hard Drive into Virtual Machine?

[JDuncan]

Is it possible (like in TV Shows lol) to easily plug in any hard drive and boot it up in VM Ware to load windows/osx/nix, etc with out the actual hardware? The following sounds like it does, but i do not want to buy the software only to find out it doesnt do what i am looking for....

VMware Hardware Version 10
This version of VMware Workstation includes VMware hardware Version 10 and is
compatible with vSphere 5.5. Hardware versions introduce new virtual hardware
functionality and new features while enabling VMware to run legacy operating
systems in our virtual machines.

 

[Markverhyden]

I'm pretty certain that if your HD is a M$ OS you can only do that in Hyper-V from what I have read in the past. Personally I prefer just to do a P2V migration. Here is a thread if you have already not seen it.

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1668639/booting-physical-disk-virtual-machine.html

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Is it possible (like in TV Shows lol) to easily plug in any hard drive and boot it up in VM Ware to load windows/osx/nix, etc with out the actual hardware? The following sounds like it does, but i do not want to buy the software only to find out it doesnt do what i am looking for....

If I understand what you're asking...."Yes"....this is a function of hypervisors. You can plug in a hard drive ....or assign a section of an existing hard drive in the hyper-visor...and "install" an operating system as a "guest".

Microsoft Virtual PC, and its big brother Hyper-V
VMWares ESX/VSphere
Oracle VirtualBox
etc.

If you're talking about an existing hard drive in a computer, that already has an operating system on it....typically we run a "P 2 V" converter tool..."Physical to Virtual"..to make a file that gets mounted, like Mark mentioned above.

 

[nlinecomputers]

If you are just wanting to run a virtual machine on your desktop then the free VirtualBox is probably all you are going to need. If this is for a production environment like running multiple servers off of one set of hardware then Hyper-V is what you'd need for this.

I use VirtualBox all the time to test out Linux distros and so that I have running copies of all the major Desktop OS so that I can help clients over the phone. Menu items change and sometime I need to see what I am doing in order to walk a client through the same thing.

 

[red12049]

Paragon Go Virtual

http://www.tucows.com/preview/800175/Paragon-Go-Virtual

Rick