My dad is buying me some computer upgrades so that I can do some of my Microsoft course labwork at home. The lab exercises require a team of four virtual machines running Windows Server 2003. The courseware came with a 120-day trial of Windows Server 2003 which can be installed up to 5 times. At college they use the Workstation version of VMware, but this costs money, so I was wondering which free virtualization product would be best?
Here's a list of the ones I've found so far, but it's not clear what the strengths and weaknesses of each one are:
- VMware Server
- Microsoft Virtual PC 2007
- Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2
- Sun VirtualBox
- QEMU
As for requirements, whichever product I end up going with needs to be able to run 4 machines simultaneously, with virtual networking between them, and it needs to be hostable on Windows XP Pro 32-bit and support Windows Server 2003 32-bit as a guest, and it needs to support an interactive mode (i.e. a mode where I can see the desktops on the virtual machines), and it needs to be fairly easy to switch between virtual machines. As for my computer, it should be up to the task - it already has an E6600 processor and after the upgrade it will have 4Gb RAM and a terabyte hard drive.