Virtual PC limitations...

I am currently working on-site and have a need to set up a virtual pc environment mirroring the clients’ production environment. Virtual PC seems to be the perfect solution. Everything has been up and running fine, but occasionally, well, always, my environment crashes and all 4 vpc’s come crashing down.

This has been a severe hindrance in moving forward as I never know when it is going to happen, just that it will.

Well I finally decided to do a little research and it turns out there is a known bug when you run multiple guest operating systems whose combined RAM configuration is larger than 2 GB. There is a deadlocking issue in the Virtual PC memory aperture list that is used to keep track of the guest operating system’s memory (this is from the KB article).

It turns out that there is a Hotfix for this and I contacted Microsoft to get it. Here is a link to the KB article.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/887181/en-us

I hope this helps at least one person, as it has caused me a great deal of grief.

In the end the fix did not solve my problem. I had to reduce the RAM allocation of all my virtual pcs so that the total was < 2 GB and all is well.