Do you have a Windows desktop? Would you rather have a Linux desktop? Would you like to run Linux as your primary OS but keep your Windows desktop on hand as a virtual desktop? This is the situation I found myself in.
My employer issued me a 32-bit Windows 7 OS on a 64-bit i5 laptop with 8Gig of RAM. Not only is that extremely wasteful (32-bit OS's can only address 4Gig of physical memory), it was also not my OS of choice. So, I decided to virtualize my Windows 7 install and run it inside a 64-bit Linux OS. My goal was to keep all my corporate standard programs and settings (including Windows domain registration) and just simply run Windows as a virtual desktop instead of my primary OS.
I did this using VMWare vCenter Converter. vCenter Converter allows you to virtualize Windows 7 in the background while you work. You can even save your virtualized hard drive to the physical hard drive that you are virtualizing. You simply start up vCenter Converter as Administrator in Windows 7 and walk through the motions to create a virtual hard drive. I selected the format of the virtual hard drive as Virtual Server 1.x and I specified the virtual hard drive to be SCSI (for some reason that's the only option that works). I also resized the destination virtual hard drive to 40GB and I specified that the image should expect a single processor.
Once your new virtual drive is created, copy it off somewhere safe so that you'll have it once you install your Linux distro (I copied it to an external HD). Now, pop in your Linux install disk and replace Windows 7 with Linux (I used Ubuntu 11.04).
Once you have
Now fire up your newly created virtual and see your old Windows 7 desktop OS run inside your new Linux OS. And the best part is, your virtualized Windows 7 desktop OS will still maintain all the domain configuration info.
Over a month later...
An interesting thing happened to me about a month after I virtualized my Windows 7 desktop and began running it on Linux: I was somehow dropped from the domain. After doing a little online research, it turns out that I am not the first person to have this problem (surprise). But the good news is that there is a way to fix it.
Apparently, after 30 days my computer's domain password is set to update and that's where the problem happens. When my computer updates its password on the domain, it breaks the trust relationship with the domain. I would think that a virtualized version of Windows could exist inside a host on the domain the same as a physical or paravirtual version of Windows, but this does not seem to be the case.
So, it would seem that the solution is to stop my virtual Windows' machine from having its password updated. And that's exactly what I did. You see, when your Windows computer updates its password on the domain, it is determined by the client and not by the domain controller. So, without bothering my friendly IT staff, I can tell my virtual Windows install to never allow it's domain password to expire. To do that I just have to update the following registry property to value I have specified below.
Property: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesNetlogonParametersDisablePasswordChange
Value: 1
Hopefully, you are doing this before you run into a domain trust issue with your virtual Windows install. Otherwise, like me, you will have to get re-added to the domain. And after I take care of getting myself re-added to the domain, I'll wait a couple of months to verify that this worked.
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