I'm not sure I understand your question, but let me see... First of all, I am acquainted only with two virtual OS environments: Microsoft's Virtual Pc 2007, and VMware's VM Player. My pc is a Vista Ultimate desktop machine. I run several editions of Microsoft Windows as virtual machines on it: Vista Home Premium Edition, XP Home Edition, and XP Pro Edition. I also have a friend garycase, a fellow expert on Experts-Exchange who runs VMware Server on one of his many pcs, and he built me a VMware virtual machine of Vista Ultimate x64, which I run with VMware Player. (I also have several different flavors of Linux as virtual machines that I sometimes play around with using VMware Player.) As far as I know, there is no virtual machine that will allow you to run either of your versions of Visual Studio BY ITSELF. (Other experts may step into your question more experienced than I in this area and contradict me.) As far as I know, you have to install a version of Windows XP as a virtual OS, say, on your Vista laptop, and then under your "real" OS, namely Vista, you could run one version of Visual Studio, and under the virtual OS of Windows XP you could run the other. I do this with respect to Internet Explorer. Under Vista, of course, I use its version 7 of IE, both on the real OS and the virtual OSes. Under XP Home as a virtual OS I run its version 7 of IE (it is not exactly the same in both Vista and XP), and under XP Pro as a virtual OS I run IE 6.
Does this help clarify your question?
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by: jhyieslaPosted on 2008-10-12 at 10:29:22ID: 22698146
There are several solutions. Basically what a Virtual machine (VM) does is create a new "PC" on top of a real physical PC. If you're a mac user you can do the same thing with Windows XP and Vista on top of the Mac OS X. You start up the virtualization software like VMware or Virtual PC as you would any other app. Then you create a virtual computing environment be defining the amount of had drive space and memory that you want to devote to this virtual PC. Then you insert your XP or Vista CD and start the virtual PC and it goes through a normal install of the product, but all within the virtual environment. The entire virtual PC lives within a file on your real PC. The virtual PC runs on top of your real one so you can have Vista as your real OS and XP as your virtual or any combination and, if you have enough resources, you can run more than one virtual machine at the same time. Each VM has it's own C: drive and no VM will interact with the real C: drive or anything that your real OS recognizes unless you share drive space by mapping a drive.
There are a couple of things that are necessary to run any virtualization software. You have t have adequate RAM. If your real OS requires 1 GB to do what you need to do and you create a VM that needs another 1 GB, then if you don't have more than 2 GB of RAM, one or the other will suffer. The same thing applies to your CPU and your hard disk space.
You also have to have legitimate licenses for all your software. So if your physical PC is running Vista and you want a VM of XO then you also need a real license of XP. If you also want to run a Vista VM, you wold need another license of Vista,