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Is it possible to run an already-installed Windows inside Xen, similar to how Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion can run a bootcamp Windows as a VM on Mac OS?

My plan is, in a few weeks when Windows 7 is out, to buy a netbook with Windows 7 (assuming these beasts will exist) and install Linux with Xen on it so I can boot between Windows, Linux, and Xen with Xen running both the installed Linux and the installed Windows 7.

Any ideas?

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  • Quite some time passed meanwhile, but possibly somebody cares anyway. Here are my experiences + one problem I'm still trying to solve: serverfault.com/questions/624339/… Besides of that (and, also Windows keeps telling me that it's not genuine) works nicely.
    – tge
    Commented Oct 17, 2014 at 8:48

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In my experience, running an installed OS on virtualized hardware doesn't work well. Every time you switch back and forth the OS has to reconfigure itself. I'm not sure to what extent this applies to xen, but in VMWare it was extremely difficult to make it work properly and it would probably trip modern Windows (XP onwards) hardware activation (i.e. you'd have to get a new activation key from MS).

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  • Yes, that was what I was thinking too. But I'd hate to require two Windows installations on the same box. I believe 7 Ultimate comes with the license to run four virtual machines though.
    – Andrew J. Brehm
    Commented Aug 20, 2009 at 13:18
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I'm currently running Win7 under Debian Xen (deb 64 bit, win7 32 bit).

Runs fine, but only have 1G RAM right now -- I'm upgrading to 8G soon. Problems are no sound support and it keeps wanting me to register.

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  • Is this an installed (on the hard disk) Windows 7 or a Windows 7 installed in a Xen VM in a disk image?
    – Andrew J. Brehm
    Commented Feb 1, 2010 at 15:32

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