VirtualBox Uses

[Mike McCall]

Unless you have a SLIC key or one from a label on the OEM machine it will not work.

I have the product key & the OEM COA label. There's also 7 groups of 6 numbers on a paper marked CP Pro. Each group has a letter above it A-G. Another pice of paper has the same thing with different numbers marked Office 2003. This particular system belonged to my father-in-law (who's 96) which he won at a hockey game (seriously). He's the most non-technical person I've ever met and could never get past turning it on no matter how much help I tried to give him. The hardware's long gone, but the software remains.

You mention SLIC, but did you mean SLP? Wikipedia shows generic keys for SLP, though they haven't been used since Win8. I don't know if it being OEM is the issue as I would expect activation to flag it instead of failing to connect.

 

[Mike McCall]

See if you can dig up SP3 version.

Only copy of XP I have. If I can't get it to work it's not a big deal. It was a custom built system by a local company rather than a recognizable brand name.

 

[NviGate Systems]

VirtualBox is nice, but do remember if you use it commercially I believe there is licensing that comes into play. For home use it's a personal license that allows basically unlimited use.

Hyper-V on the other hand, I don't know about licensing, and if your are allowed to use it in production business setups without an extra license or different version.

 

[Mike McCall]

VirtualBox is nice, but do remember if you use it commercially I believe there is licensing that comes into play. For home use it's a personal license that allows basically unlimited use.

Hyper-V on the other hand, I don't know about licensing, and if your are allowed to use it in production business setups without an extra license or different version.

No commercial usage here. Just experimenting & learning at this point.

 

[Markverhyden]

SLIC refers to the actual key. SLP is a license file. The OEM's are issued a limited number of SLIC keys which are then used on all new builds. My experience is they will be the same on the same or similar models. But big changes, like DT vs LT, will have different SLIC's.

I did have a customer whose previous IT person put a Dell image into a parallels machine, I think it was XP Home, but it was a running system. Is your's Pro?

But I agree, the connection issue is some kind of networking thing. I'd carefully check the port settings, maybe put in a manual IP and 8.8.8.8 for DNS.

 

[Mike McCall]

Yes, mine is Pro. I'm beginning to think it's due to it being OEM. Bringing up a command prompt I can ping Google, OpenDNS, Facebook, etc. IE only allows me to go to MSN. I can search from there, but am unable to visit any pages. I would have expected a flag at activation rather than being crippled even before that. Shows you what I know.

 

[Markverhyden]

Does the machine run? Why not just image the drive since it will already be activated.

 

[NJW]

VirtualBox is nice, but do remember if you use it commercially I believe there is licensing that comes into play. For home use it's a personal license that allows basically unlimited use.

The basic program is GPL, but the Extension Pack is personal use/evaluation.

The licence is US$50 – not too bad – with a minimum order of 100. Good luck with that, Oracle.

I'll carry on using VB without USB, RDP, ...

 

[Mike McCall]

Does the machine run? Why not just image the drive since it will already be activated.

There is no physical machine to image.

 

[trevm999]

Hyper-V on the other hand, I don't know about licensing, and if your are allowed to use it in production business setups without an extra license or different version.

I don't think there are any windows 10 specific licencing restrictions with Hyper-V, but for production VMs you'd be better off with the free Hyper-V Server OS on the bare metal

 

[Markverhyden]

The only M$ client OS restrictions, for OEMs, are similar to Apple's from what I remember . You can run an OEM VM as long as the underlying hardware is from the same OEM.

 

[Mike McCall]

It's really not that important for me to have a working copy of XP, though it might be helpful sometimes. At this point I'm mostly playing with virtualization to learn. I've already learned a lot just by getting VB running with a few guests. While I knew about type-1 & type-2 hypervisors, I've learned a bit about those differences as VB is a type-2, while Hyper-V is a type-1. They don't play well together as a result. Hyper-V is free both as a built-in, and as a bare metal server. I didn't read anything about personal vs commercial restrictions regarding either version, other than having valid copies of guests..

VB seems to be easier to get setup & running. Being type-2 the software handles most of the niggly hardware configuration issues for you. Hyper-V is a type-1 and directly interfaces with the host hardware, rather than relying on the Host OS to handle those things. For this reason it seems prudent to familiarize myself with VB to start with, then move to a more capable & sophisticated hypervisor like Hyper-V. Hyper-V is capable of not only acting as a host for the guest OS's, but apparently also allows for Virtual Switches which means one can network the guest OS's in a virtual environment. From that standpoint alone, Hyper-V could be a valuable tool for not only learning virtualization, but perhaps also for learning basic networking as well without investing in various pieces of hardware to get started.

A few articles I've found helpful, though there's tons more available:

https://www.altaro.com/hyper-v/client-hyper-v-vs-virtualbox/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-windows/about/

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/2087-hyper-v-virtualization-setup-use-windows-10-a.html

 

[ell]

So, I've been playing around with VB recently and have setup several guests which include Win XP (though I haven't gotten it connected to the internet), Win7, OpenSUSE, Mint (software rendering only), and CentOS. Fun to play with and I can see how VM's will reduce hardware costs. But other than running various desktop OS's on a single machine, what are you actually using VM's for in your own environment?

I have all flavors of windows and a mac. I also have a couple badly infected snapshots I use for testing my removal skills.