Chris G wrote:
The real issue though is that it's simply still *easier* to run a few oddball things in XP in virtualbox, plus it's there if you need to try something else which for some reason doesn't work in Linux (often it doesn't work in Windows either but it's nice to be able to check). Finally it means I can often help friends and family on the phone by doing the same thing on my screen that they're doing to see where they're going wrong.
What have you got *against* running XP (or Vista or W7) in VirtualBox? It's free, it's easy to set up and very, very few people don't have a licence they can use.
Personally I have nothing *against* it, to me it is a necessary evil to be able to replicate customers systems. It doesn't mean I have to like it though.*
The problem however with doing this to support one or two applications is that you end up having to maintain 2 operating systems, Windows will still need security updates etc if you are going to let it lose on the network, will still need anti virus measures etc.
For one application I would always see how far I get with wine first, without the VM overhead it usually offers better performance and you don't have to waste system resources booting an entire second OS just to do one thing.
* I don't dislike all aspects of Virtualisation, in fact p2ving a box and keeping functional VM clones is a very worthwhile alternative to the dark server principles of Disaster Recovery Planning and something I have used to save my customers a great deal of money. Also using a VM environment to "dry run" risky upgrades or irreversible operations has saved me a considerable amount of pain in the past. It's also seems to be working out pretty well for consolidation projects and if that means less machines sitting 99% idle in server rooms saping power around the world then this is a good thing.