Virtualization solution #3: Windows Virtual PC

Note that my Windows platform is Windows 7, which basically includes a free Windows XP virtual machine for Windows Virtual PC. But I was wanting to add physical hard drives. And... err... no. It won't do it.

My basic take: Windows Virtual PC works well if you're wanting some Windows "sandboxes" to play in. The drop-and-drag integration in particular is fairly impressive. But for what I want -- to create a virtual machine that's given ownership of a bunch of disks in order to software RAID-6 them and divvy slices of the resulting arrays out via iSCSI, CIFS, and AFP, i.e., to create a virtual storage appliance -- it simply lacks the basic functionality I need. Thus far my 64-bit Scientific Linux 6 is working quite well as a JBOD-manager with VMware Player... and there's not many virtualization solutions that can do that, and nothing other than VMware Player on the desktop.

-ELG