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For years, I've been dreaming of using a VM as my primary Windows machine as I cringe at having to set up a new machine from scratch every three to five years.

Until now I've been dissuaded by the huge performance degradation implied by a VM, but I'm wondering if in 2020, on high-end hardware, this idea could start to make sense.

For some old 16-bit applications I'm using Windows 2000 on Windows 10 and that works seamlessly, but I'm a bit shy about attempting to virtualize Win7 or Win10 on Windows 10, especially when considering CPU-intensive applications such as Photoshop or watching videos.

Insights please?

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    I have several Virtual Machines running on VMware Workstation V15.5.5 on a Windows 10 Pro V2004 Host Machine. The host is a Intel i7 CPU with 16 GB of memory and a very fast NVMe 1 TB SSD. The guest machines work just fine in this environment. I am not discouraged at setting up a new machine every 5 years. I have two working machines and so setting up a new one is fairly easy: Basic updates and main software in one day and remaining software as I go. All software is in my document files.
    – anon
    Commented Jun 1, 2020 at 15:42
  • You're overthinking this. When upgrading, just keep the disk from old computer or clone it to a new one. Cloning will take as much time as copying the VM virtual disk would. Just make sure to buy BOX license of Windows so changing hardware isn't an issue.
    – gronostaj
    Commented Jun 1, 2020 at 15:45
  • VMWare which is the elephant in the hypervisor world, won't support DX11, until the next version of Workstation. So if you need DX 11 or DX 12 it's not realistic to use a virtual machine. I have no idea when ESXi will support it, but Photoshop, might not support the GPUs that ESXi supports for hardware acceleration.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jun 1, 2020 at 16:21
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    Some virtualization software have additional problems with audio devices. For example VirtualBox is nearly useless if you are trying to record audio (e.g. microphone) from my tests. Same is true for forwarding USB Bluetooth devices into the VM: Therefore all type of VoIP or video meeting software are next to useless inside a Virtualbox VM. May be VMWare works better but I don't have a VMWare VM to compare.
    – Robert
    Commented Jun 1, 2020 at 16:36
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    Wouldn't you need a valid Windows license for each VM install? Or is that OT for here?
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Jun 1, 2020 at 17:46

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