Parallels and Vista Home Editions

bbloke · #1 February 5th, 2007, 05:47 AM

Parallels have posted a note that Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium are not allowed to be run under a virtual machine:

Parallels and Vista

I'm not really sure of Microsoft's reasoning here, as surely a copy of Vista sold is a copy sold...

Trip · #2 February 5th, 2007, 09:04 AM

Microsoft is hilarious.

lurk · #3 February 5th, 2007, 10:22 AM

Microsoft's reasoning is that they can make you pay for the more expensive copy of vista, sine you are not in the dumb grandma demographic. I think that is way bogus myself.

**fryke** · #4 February 5th, 2007, 10:44 AM

On the other hand, it _is_ theirs to define. Pity.

bbloke · #5 February 28th, 2007, 06:52 AM

On a related note, VMware have posted a white paper on their web site.

Quote:

Originally Posted by VMware

Microsoft is trying to restrict customers’ flexibility and freedom to choose virtualization software by limiting who can run their software and how they can run it. Microsoft is leveraging its ownership of the market leading operating system and numerous applications that are market leaders in their respective categories (Exchange, SQL Server, Active Directory) to drive customers to use Microsoft virtualization products. Their tactics are focused on software licensing and distribution terms (for SQL Server, Exchange, Windows Server, Vista) and through the APIs and formats for virtualized Windows.

In particular, Microsoft does not have key virtual infrastructure capabilities (like VMotion), and they are making those either illegal or expensive for customers; Microsoft doesn't have virtual desktop offerings, so they are denying it to customers; and Microsoft is moving to control this new layer that sits on the hardware by forcing their specifications and APIs on the industry. Included below in this document are explanations with supporting details of some of these specific areas.

...

Microsoft needs to fundamentally accommodate market choice and interoperability. Customers require freedom of choice to implement both Microsoft and non-Microsoft applications running on Windows with any chosen system virtualization layer. Customers do not benefit from being forced into a homogenous virtualization/OS/application stack.

There is also some discussion in the VMTN blog.

Thank The Cheese · #6 March 4th, 2007, 12:13 AM

do you think there is a possibility that this is to try and discourage people from using Windows on a Mac with something like Parallels?

I tried the new coherence mode today and it is amazing. Something like that must scare the hell out of Microsoft.

**fryke** · #7 March 4th, 2007, 04:38 AM

I don't think this is specifically about Macs. It's been said a lot: Every license you buy for running Windows on your Mac is - for Microsoft - as good as any other license sold, basically. BUT: They _do_ see that people start to use other OSs (Mac OS X is not the _only_ stable counterpart to Windows with virtualisation capabilities, linux is probably more in focus for this, because it can be installed on any PC that previously was "Windows-only") as their basis, and Windows is becoming merely a layer to run some "needed old software". And they probably want to make this step simply more expensive. (However: If you merely need Windows as a layer for Office 2003 or IE 6 or 7, then Windows XP will do just fine, even the Home version.)

Damrod · #8 March 4th, 2007, 07:11 AM

Maybe. In terms of versatilety (as long as you are not a gamer), the new vm-possibilities own MS. I tried the Coherence thing of Parallels on our new MacBook at work, and I never saw such a neat integration with the host OS as with this. If a nicer theme is put into XP (the XP-task bar at the top looks a bit ugly), it's a great thing.

Will save us a lot of hassle in terms of getting our Mac-loving professor/head of department attatched to the oncoming Sharepoint environment