Having multiple OSes in one machine. That is what virtual machine is all about. Virtual Machine is good for developers and also for tech support as you don’t have to buy another computer or reboot the computer to get into another OS. I just installed XP on my Vista machine inside a virtual machine. Now I don’t have to go to my desktop PC to help my friends or family when they are having trouble with XP. I just boot up the virtual machine, and I can access it from my laptop.

There are a number of virtual machine software that is on the market. Name few are Parallels and VMware. I have never tried Parallel before, but VMware works fine for me. Here are the comparison of application virtual machine.

The great thing about virtual machine is that you can try new OSes such as Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, and Vista without damaging your current OS. If you don’t like the OS you are trying, you can just delete it and nothing will be affecting your host OS.

Another reason why people are using virtual machine is because of software compatibility. Everybody said that a lot of programs that they are currently using in Windows XP are still not compatible with Vista. So this is not a reason anymore, hence you can run XP inside Vista.