There’s a detailed knowledge base article from Microsoft on creating virtual machines with Virtual PC 2004 [KB912826].
And we now will take a look on virtual machines are created with Virtual PC 2007. If you followed a previous article you have a Virtual PC 2007 installed on your system. So, let’s go ahead and create a virtual Windows XP Professional machine. |
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1) Go to Start -> All Programs and click on Microsoft Virtual PC shortcut. |
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2) When you click on it the Virtual PC Console appears.
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3) The “Welcome to the New Virtual Machine Wizard” automatically opens inviting you to create and configure or add an existing virtual machine. Click Next. |
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4) In this “How-To” we’ll create a new virtual machine using a basic configuration. We’ll take a deeper look at other options in our future “How-To” articles. So, let’s leave the “Create virtual machine” radio button selected per default and click Next.
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5) In this screen we are prompted to type the name of our new virtual machine and select where we’re going to place the virtual machine files. Let’s click on Browse… button. |
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6) By default the Wizard places it’s virtual machine files under My Documents -> My Virtual Machines folder. I will leave it as is, but you may choose any other location depending on your preferences. Let’s type a name for our virtual machine and click Save. In my example I use “Windows XP”. |
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7) After we click Save we can see that the path and name of our virtual machine with vmc extension appeared in the Name and Location text box. Click Next. |
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8) Since we’re creating a Windows XP machine select Windows XP from the Operating system dropdown box. Notice, that when you select an operating system, the Wizard provides you with some basic information about default virtual machine settings. For example, if we would have selected Windows Vista, the default recommended memory would have been 512 MB rather than 128 in case of Windows XP. We can change memory and other parameters later or leave them per default. Click Next to go to the Memory configuration page of the Wizard.
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9) In the Memory page of the Wizard we can select one of two options, i.e. either leave a default “Using the recommended RAM” or select “Adjusting the RAM”.
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Note: If you want to change the recommended RAM size select “Adjusting the RAM” radio button and choose how much RAM you want to give to a virtual machine. |
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10. On the Virtual Hard Disk Options page select “A new virtual hard disk” to create a virtual hard disk for our virtual machine. Then click Next.
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11) On the Virtual Hard Disk Location page you are presented with two options. One is to select a different location for the virtual hard disk (file with vhd extension) and size of the disc. I will use 4096 Mb (which is 4 Gb) in my example. After selecting location and size of the virtual disc click the Next button.
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12) At this stage the virtual machine is created. Click Finish to close the “New Virtual Machine Wizard”.
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13) Now we can see that the newly created virtual machine is added to a Virtual PC Console. In our Next tutorial we’ll take a brief look on Settings available for this machine prior to installing Windows XP.
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Before I complete this “How-To”, let’s take a look at the folder, where we have placed our virtual machine files during running the wizard. If you didn’t change the default location and used the same name as in my example you can find those files under My Documents/My Virtual Machines/Windows XP. Let’s open this folder and we’ll see two files, one is Windows XP Hard Disc.vhd and another one is Windows XP.vmc.
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VHD stands for Virtual Hard Disc and is actually our virtual disc where we’ll be installing our operating system. Note, that the file size write now is very small. It’s OK since it will grow as we install the operating system. VMC stands for Virtual Machine Configuration and contains all configuration parameters of our virtual machine. It’s actually an XML formatted file and looks something like on this picture.
I’ve collapsed some levels for this representation. We’ll review most of these settings in our future “How-To” articles. Also we’ll learn about other associated files like VSV and how to work with all these files to accomplish various tasks.
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This ends up our second How-To. See you in the next article, where we’ll install a guest operating system into our virtual machine.
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Virtualization 
