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Virtual PC 2007 was just in time for my current project, were we are in doubt to install Virtual PC 2007 on every machine.

To do this i first needed the installer, so i downloaded it from the Microsoft site and stored it in C:\Temp
Now i had to remove the setup wrapper to get the msi, this was done by using the command c:\temp\setup.exe /c /t c:\temp

The result was a msi package and a msxml hotfix documented in kb927977

These 2 files i used in my BDD deployment with the following commandline to install them unattended:

msxml6-KB927977-enu-x86.exe /quiet
msiexec /qn /i"Virtual_PC_2007_Install.msi" allusers=2

One of the main problems i then found was how to change the default folder where the Virtual Machines are stored. By Default this location is .\My Documents\My Virtual Machines.

This location is a bit tricky if the My Documents is redirected to the network, causing slow Virtual PC performance and a higher network load.

To change the Default location you only have to add a system environment variable named MYVIRTUALMACHINES on the host machine which contains the path to a folder on your local harddrive (or for examle a different disk in your machine or as in my case C:\VPC)

Now all machines are rolled-out containing Virtual PC 2007 and save their VHD’s to a the C:\VPC folder

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Virtualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.