Drew Wutka
DWUTKA at Marlow.com
Mon Aug 3 15:23:25 CDT 2009
Yes John, VPC allows for access to a drive on a host machine. You can do this in a few ways. First, you can map a local drive as a network drive. Essentially your NIC acts like a little router. Second, with VM Additions installed (something VPC can install on the virtual OS), you can either setup a 'shared' folder (which shows up as a mapped drive in the VM), or you can drag and drop files between the host and the client. I did a little poking around last week, to see what the real differences between VPC and VMWare were. I found it interesting. If you are going to be using Microsoft OSes, VPC is a better platform. Both VPC 2007 and Virtual Server 2005 are free to download and use. With VMWare, there are several actually programs involved. The only free ones are a Viewer, and Server. All the sites I perused had the general opinion that VMWare was far more versatile, especially with non-MS OSes, but VPC was optimized for MS OSes and being that it is free makes it all the better. Personally, I used VPC for quite some time before I ever played around with Virtual Server. I like both. VPC is great for running a virtual machine on your desktop, but virtual server is WAY cool by letting you run them in the 'background'. Drew -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of jwcolby Sent: Saturday, August 01, 2009 6:06 PM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: [AccessD] windows vm Does anyone know if the Windows VM stuff allows the vm to access disk drives on the host machine? I use Windows Home Server, which runs over the top of Windows 2003. I have been using it successfully for well over a year, however it seems I overclocked my cpu some time back and managed to damage the OS - it started rebooting on me. By the time I discovered the problem I had to do a reinstall. I run MyMovies which is a third party add-in for Windows Media Center. It uses a SQL Server 2005 express database (very small, about 10 mbytes), which I had running on the WHS server. Now of course I have to rebuild that as well as other software I had installed for the purpose of ripping my dvds to hard disk etc. Since I have to reinstall, it occurred to me that if I placed that in a VM (and it will run in a vm) then I can place the vm out in another drive and if the time ever comes to move the database, it will be in a vm and be easily portable. I tried to use VMWare. While it does allow me to map a physical drive to the vm and see it from inside the vm, for some reason it does not see all of the directories of the host's drive and even those that it can see it cannot manipulate correctly. Maaaaaybe it has to do with the drive being 1.5 gb, not sure. At any rate, the software running in the vm needs to be able to read (rip) dvds and store them on a physical drive on the host machine. I am trying to get Microsoft's VM stuff set up but I know nothing about it and before I get too deeply into this and discover it does not do this, I thought I'd ask. So, can the VM see, read and write to a host drive or partition, which is still visible to the host, i.e. either writing to the disk will not cause corruption. In fact the Windows Media Center does not write to the movies stuff but it does write to music files IIRC and so I do not want any chance of corrupting stuff. Anyone? -- John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com The information contained in this transmission is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain II-VI Proprietary and/or II-VI Business Sensitive material. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender immediately and destroy the material in its entirety, whether electronic or hard copy. You are notified that any review, retransmission, copying, disclosure, dissemination, or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.