Do you have a Windows desktop? Would you prefer a Linux desktop? Do you want to run Linux as your primary OS but always at hand as a virtual desktop Windows desktop? This is the situation I found myself in.
My employer issued me a 32-bit Windows 7 operating system on a 64-bit i5 laptop with 8Gig of RAM. Is that not only very wasteful (32-bit OS's can only 4Gig physical memory address), it was also not my OS of choice. So, I decided to virtualize my Windows 7 install and run it within a 64-bit Linux OS. My goal was to give all my default corporate settings and programs (including Windows domain registration) and just run Windows as a virtual desktop in place of my primary OS.
I did this using VMWare vCenter Converter. vCenter Converter allows you to virtualize Windows 7 in the background while you work. You can even build your virtualized hard disk on the physical hard disk that you are virtualizing. You just boot vCenter Converter as an administrator in Windows 7 and walk through the motions to a virtual hard disk. I selected the format of the virtual hard disk as Virtual Server 1.x and I've entered the virtual hard disk as SCSI (for some reason that is the only option that works). I also resized the destination virtual hard disk 40 GB and I have specified that one should expect the image processor.
Once your new virtual drive is created, copy it off somewhere safe, so that the you have once you install your Linux distro (I copied to an external HD). Now, pop in your Linux install disc and replace Windows 7 Linux (I used Ubuntu 11.04).
Once you install Virtual Box Ubuntu up,-it is easy and it will work with VMWare virtual hard disks. Create a new image in VirtualBox and add your Windows 7 virtual hard disk that you created as a SAS SCSI drive. Check the systems settings section, or that that IO APIC is checked.
Now fire up your newly created virtual and see that your old Windows 7 desktop OS within your new Linux OS running. And the best part is, your virtualized Windows 7 desktop OS will continue all domain configuration info.
More than a month later ...
An interesting thing happened to me about a month after I started my Windows 7 desktop virtualized and running it on Linux: somehow I fell from the domain. After doing a little online research, it appears that I'm not the first person to have this problem (surprise). But the good news is that there is a way to fix it.
Apparently, after 30 days of my computer domain password is set to update, and that's where the problem happens. When my computer update the password on the domain, the trust with the domain breaks it. I would think that a virtualized version of Windows can exist within a host on the domain or the same as a physical version of Windows, but this not paravirtual seems to be the case.
So, it seems that the solution is to stop my virtual Windows machine of having its password updated. And that's exactly what I did. You see, when your Windows computer update the password on the domain is determined by the client and not by the domain controller. So, without bothering my friendly IT staff, can I install my virtual Windows to allow your domain password never expires. To do that I have the following registry value to update that I've entered property below.
Property: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Netlogon\Parameters\DisablePasswordChange
Value: 1
Hopefully, you do this before you perform in a domain trust problem with your virtual Windows installation. Otherwise, I like you have to get added to the domain. And after I added to the domain again take care of myself, I'll wait a few months in order to verify that this worked.
Clayton Long
Clayton Long is a Lead Software Engineer with Nielsen and a technology enthusiast. He has a master's degree in computer science and he has certifications in both Java and.Net.
http://www.claytonstechnobabble.com/
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