Vista - Is VPC 2004 SP1 still supported

Hi,

I am currently working in an organization to help them migrate their
desktops from NT 4.0 to XP. The problem here is that some applications that
work fine in NT are known to not work in XP. So we are planning to use VPC
to host a virtual NT 4.0 inside XP for compatibility.

We have tried VPC 2007 SP1, but we found that NT 4.0 is not an officially
supported guest and VPC 2007 does not provide a driver for the virtual
network card.

So we are trying VPC 2004 SP1. NT 4.0 is supported on it and it has a
virtual network card driver. Everything is nice.

However we are afraid that VPC 2004 SP1 is no longer support by Microsoft.

May I know if VPC 2004 SP1 is still supported, and if so, when the support
ends?

Thank you very much.

"Small Potato" <smallpotato2006@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23fRzGKbwJHA.4636@xxxxxx
Mainstream support ended only a few days ago.

Extended support will continue until 2014, but this would require you to
purchase an extended support contract - these are typically extremely
expensive...



--
Mark Rae
ASP.NET MVP
http://www.markrae.net

On Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:21:24 +0800, "Small Potato"
<smallpotato2006@xxxxxx> wrote:
For what do you need Microsoft support?
If you only need to create a few virtual machines with NT4 on then
this is rather straightforward (you have probably already done this
based on your remarks). No support needed for this. And you can always
ask here if you get some issues you cannot resolve. People here are
rather helpful and you will probably get a solution rather quickly.

Since many years you have NO support at all for the NT4 guests and
this is *really* what counts to me, not weather you have support for
the VPC2004 virtualization system.....

When you have set up the NT4 machines you should make sure that they
do not have the ability to connect to the Internet beecause there are
no security or other updates available from Microsoft for NT4 since
many years. So you would want to keep them as isolated from the
malicious Internet world as possible.

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

On Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:21:24 +0800, "Small Potato"
<smallpotato2006@xxxxxx> wrote:
The driver for NT is the same in both VPC2004 and CPC2007, the same
NIC is emulated, DEC/Intel 21140. The NIC driver is provided by the
OS, not VPC.

The NIC should just work in either version.

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

"Steve Jain [MVP]" <noreply.-@-.essjae.com> wrote in message
news:aj9pu4dtd2hln22961ipg44ms6p04m125c@xxxxxx
Yes indeed. At the screen which asks for networking hardware details, the
emulated NIC is found straightaway by clicking the Start Search button.


--
Mark Rae
ASP.NET MVP
http://www.markrae.net

Steve Jain [MVP] wrote:Yes, I do not understand the problem. I have an NT4 guest that I created in VPC
2004, and moved to VPC 2007, and it works fine. It gets a DHCP address and can
access the Internet and my LAN just like all my other machines (physical or
virtual).

--
David Wilkinson
Visual C++ MVP

On Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:26:59 -0400, David Wilkinson
<no-reply@xxxxxx> wrote:
That is to be expected too. :-)

Basically VPV2007 is a version upgrade of VPC2004, which was done when
Vista was about to be released. The VPC2007 upgrade included support
for Vista and some other new Windows versions and it also dropped some
support of older Windows versions (I am now talking about the guest
operating systems, not the host) like MS-DOS, but NT4 is still a
supported guest!

A virtual machine already set up and configured in VPC2004 runs just
fine also in VPC2007 as long as you observe the general rule that the
guest must be completely shut down before you change to VPC2007 from
VPC2004. Some intermediate files for saved states for example are not
compatible across VPC versions.

I have a bunch of older Windows and OS/2 guests that were created in
VPC2004 but they run just fine in VPC2007 too. :-)

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

"Bo Berglund" <boberglund@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:r5hpu4tlnjh51ebb9h8u4j6a2elin6hi2l@xxxxxx
Open up the VPC helpfile and go to the topic entitled Evaluating
Requirements. Scroll down a bit to the section which says:

The following guest operating systems that were supported in Virtual PC 2004
SP1 are compatible with this release, but they are not supported:
MS-DOS 6.22
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows ME
Windows NT 4.0 Workstation


--
Mark Rae
ASP.NET MVP
http://www.markrae.net

On Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:44:13 +0100, "Mark Rae [MVP]"
<mark@xxxxxx> wrote:
All right, I did not do that helpfile read. I thought that NT4 was not
supported but then before replying I created a new guest in VPC2007
and guess what! In the list of operating system suggestion I found NT4
(or NT Workstation as it is named).
How can one say it is not supported and yet it is listed in the
wizard???

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

"Bo Berglund" <boberglund@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:0glpu4dqs1thk50urqa8q22mugam8898pu@xxxxxx
That's correct.
It's an unsupported feature. Microsoft have left the NT4 functionality from
VPC 2004 in VPC 2007, but don't officially support it - i.e. use it at your
own risk...

Which is why NT4W is compatible with, but not supported in, VPC 2007 -
essentially, Microsoft haven't actively tested it...


--
Mark Rae
ASP.NET MVP
http://www.markrae.net