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Windows 7's Virtual XP Mode a Support Nightmare?
CWmike writes "Microsoft's decision to let Windows 7 users run Windows XP applications in a virtual machine may have been necessary to convince people to upgrade, but it could also create support nightmares, analysts said today. Gartner analyst Michael Silver outlines the downsides. 'You'll have to support two versions of Windows,' he said. 'Each needs to be secured, antivirused, firewalled and patched. If a company has 10,000 PCs, that's 20,000 instances of Windows.' The other big problem Silver foresees: Making sure the software they run is compatible with Windows 7. 'This is a great Band-Aid, but companies need to heal their applications,' Silver said. 'They'll be doing themselves a disservice if, because of XPM, they're not making sure that all their apps support Windows 7.'"
...but didn't Apple successfully pull this off twice?
stop posting troll articles!! :@
On one side, you have the convenience of having an OS thats tested, your apps work on it, everything is good. On the other, you're perpetuating an old system, and keeping people from moving forward. Support nightmare isn't the half of it, you're going to have a very mixed level of application compatibility as well. In fact, the better option might have been a better more robust compatibility function to better support older apps. Because while it's all well and good to say that companies need to upgrade their products, how about the apps that are no longer supported, but switching away from them is no option. In many larger companies it can take years to migrate to another system, even upgrading may not be an option.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
This is exactly what we want them to do. Virtualize the deprecated, old stuff, and get it out of the main operating system. Move on from the cruft of yore and build in some sweet new fundamentals that break backwards compatibility. We've been crying for them to do this for forever, so let's encourage it. It might add a bit of a support burden, but if it gives us a better product overall, what's the big deal?
As opposed to what, supporting an install of XP and an install of Windows 7? Or Windows XP in a VM and Windows 7?
Just think about it.
The need for a separate antivirus makes sense because the virtual machine is running a different operating environment with susceptibility to different viruses. A separate firewall does indeed seem superfluous.
...but didn't Apple successfully pull this off twice?
... Apple doesn't have every IT criminal on the planet gunning for their OS. They are bloody lucky to be in that situation and should IMHO be less smug about Windows security problems in their advertising. On the other hand running the defense grid for one Windows instance was fatiguing enough to persuade me to abandon Windows and become a Linux user and then an Apple customer. I still have to put in work to secure my machine but it is a lot less work than if I was using Windows. If this really means MS is doubling the security workload on each Windows box then.... hell.... I don't even want to think about it.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I'm 100% sure that a competent IT dept that has no use for this feature will, unsurprisingly, NOT USE IT, saving themselves all the support hassles entirely.
And for those that DO need this feature, they know there's basically no other way and it's worth the extra support hassle because they know they will have people saying Application XYZ MUST work I don't care how.
I suspect this means that the old applications that have to work and only currently work on XP can now be moved forward and the IT dept can get everyone onto Windows 7. Once there, the devs of these applications will have Windows 7 rather than XP to test against/run with and they'll have an incentive to update their programs to just work on Windows 7 because, like Classic on Mac OS X, this mode will have just enough 'impedience' that programs will be updated to work on Windows 7 native; but they will work okay in the meantime.
That's the thing - this isn't seamless. It's going to be a little tricky to set up applications to run in the XP box rather than natively on Windows 7, even if launching them is easy.
The trick is "Just enough impedience to get people to update to 7 native while providing a path."
I see no reason for a second AV program, providing the VM's virtual drive is readable by the host operating system. If any kind of nasty program gets installed, it's going to have hit the file system at some point, and if the host's AV can plug in to that file system, it can suspend or terminate the VM.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
How stupid are these people?
Windows alreadys supports multiple OSes, from the Win16 and DOS subsystems to the BSD/UNIX subsystem, and also the Win32 and Win64 subsystem.
Which all have their own kernels, and run in NT OS subsystems.
So adding in a VM'd version of XP is going to add to 'support'? How?
The updates still come from MS Update, it isn't like the in house people are writing the patches themselves.
If anything this creates more work for MS, not a freaking IT department.
I'm not sure where to even begin with how stupid this sounds...
More tech support? Really?
If an IT department isn't using group policies and the business centralization and integration technologies of Windows, they shouldn't be using Windows and instead move to something that has almost no central control or mangement like Linux or OS X.
The hallmark of why business CONTINUES to choose Windows deployments is the ease and control that MS continues to give IT administrators, along with their centralized server management concepts that really do make anything else out there look foolish.
A well deployed Windows server/client environment is peanuts to administer, even when the IT people shove Firefox on users and have to run around and do 'manual' updates because Firefox is 'retarded' about allowing remote or admin level updates without giving your users administrator rights.
The second part of this is not understanding the virtualization technology being used. They assume it is like a 'free window' VMWare mode.
It isn't, it somewhere better a VM and a Subsystem on the NT architecture, which is one thing that makes HyperV as powerful as it is.
Truly people forget that NT is a user mode OS-less architecture, and that everything anyone sees is a 'virtual' subsystem, even Win32 has its own kernel and doesn't really know that NT is running under it.
Ok, I'll let people go grab the facts on this crap themselves, and give Win7 a week or two i people's hands that actually 'do' know what they are talking about...
PS The XP Virtualization is mainly for corporate clients, as 99.9% of all software works on Vista and Win7.
It is only the in house written or 'corporate' written software crap that has no concept of NT security that has problems with Vista or possibly Win7 that enforces the 20yr old NT security model that the software developers should have written for in the first freaking place.
"Architect" level my ass. You probably get someone coffee. Sorry but your whole post is just ridiculous.
There's no reason for any of your 'points' to stand if you migrate the system to Windows 7.
Why have both? If Windows 7 is a better alternative, then for god's sake, run it. And don't tell me you need it just to have support for legacy apps that only run in Windows XP and not Windows 7.
Because if you DO have those apps, you either need to upgrade them to Windows 7 functionality, find something that does the job better, or just FORGET ABOUT WINDOWS 7 and stay with XP.
Damnit man, this is not that difficult to comprehend.
Why do IT guys always have to blow things way out of proportion?
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Just for the record, I've used Vista at work since it was released (doing .Net development and Database work on SQL Server).
Before SP1 was released, it was a pain in the ass. Since then... not so much.
In fact, I'm now used to Vista, and like it's extra features and perks, and find going back to XP annoying. I miss too much (the instant search everywhere, for starters, the snipping tool for another, I could go on and on) when I'm forced to use XP. And XP is so much less secure than Vista. Vista has proven to be remarkably stable and I haven't had ANY issues with viruses or trojans (not so, every XP install I've had over the same time period). It performs well, but of course I do have 4GB of memory, and wouldn't dream of saying anyone run Vista on less than 2GB.
The trash-talking of Vista is, at this point, mostly habit based on old info. It's ridiculous. ANYTHING that will help get people off XP and onto the newer more secure OS's (hopefully Win7) is a GOOD THING.
Hopefully most people won't need to use this new virtual XP VM in a regular way, in perpetuity. It can be and should be used as solely a stepping stone to get people on Win 7 and off XP, giving time for any software that refuses to run on Win7 to be updated or replaced. Mostly, the "XP Compatibility Mode" works well. For those apps that are just so badly written and so insecure and obsolete that they can't run even under that, this new XP VM provides a solution.
Of course, if software had been written correctly in the first place, then it'd run on Win7 correctly without issue.
Of course, one of the more laughable things is that SQL Server 2000, Microsoft's own product, won't run on Vista or Win7. Of course, it's a crappy database and nobody should be using it at this point... but there you go :-)
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't