Mutiple win10 licences on same machine? Possible?

[AGTDenton]

The 3900x should be strong enough for CAD work even on a virtualised environment.

With Virtual Box there is a drive encryption option, so even if you did share your external drive over the network they couldnt read it. Similar to zip files, they're either encrypted or unencrypted and you need the correct tool to be able to open a file.
Also within your guest OS, don't share your drive or data over the network, otherwise they could login and see it, in the same way as a physical PC.

You can add as many virtual hard disks as you like to your Virtual Machine and do what you like with them within the virtual environment, share them over a network, or store certain data just like a physical machine.

[atemporal]

It's how to backup files I'm wondering about. I guess I need my work files to be secure, but accessible outside of having to boot into the virtual machine. So accessible by the virtual machine, and accessible to backup onto an external (encrypted) HDD too, but that I could, for example, give to a colleague and they could access without needing my virtual machine and windows licence to do so.

[ik9000]

@atemporal if I've understood correctly AGTD is saying that the virtual machine has its own virtual drives. You keep them virtual to keep that floating OS isolated aka sandboxed. To put files onto an external SSD means that floating OS needs to see that ex.SSD and therefore map a path from the virtual machine to the physical usb port, and the device. It's this process that would require the virtual OS to stop being isolated, but start sharing system resources, and seeing other physical drives etc. I've no idea if that can even be done, but you'd need to be happy with that prospect. If the virtual OS is for testing software, checking out if something is dodgy etc then that might not be a great idea to try and let it see the wider host system and its resources.

[AGTDenton]

ik9000 is right.
You can share folders between host & guest without the need for the guest to have LAN/WAN access, or you can drag & drop files between them like RDP. You can also send the files over the Network to be backed up like you would on a physical machine. No doubt at some point you will need internet access for the work side of things to do emails etc...
But you can also store the Virtual Machine on the external drive as well, at the moment with an unknown performance hit, it's not a scenario I've dealt with. I aim to have a play with that when I get back from hospital as it will be interesting for my own knowledge if it's noticable.

Best thing to do, before putting it into production, have a go at installing a dummy environment. It's harder to imagine until you've gone through the process to understand how it would all work on a practical level.
My personal preference is VirtualBox but it's a steeper learning curve, you might find VMWare & Hyper-V much easier to use & understand just at the lack of some capabilities.

[ik9000]

Sorry to piggy back into another's thread but I thought this might be relevant to what's gone before:

A quick read of a few tech guides suggest Virtual box is more versatile than hyper V and easier to select what the VM has access to - in my case GPU resource will be important.

I'm installing virtual box (this would be in a win10 environment hence this thread) to try out some software for work ahead of splashing on licences and virtual box has this line on it's site:

Please also use version 6.0 if you need to run VMs with software virtualization, as this has been discontinued in 6.1

What is software virtualization as I assumed that would just mean the virtual machine itself, which it sounds like it can't be. So how do I know if I need that feature, does some software need special things to allow it to work in a virtual machine? Is this a niche thing I can ignore and just install the latest version of 6.1 or should I go with 6.0 (which stopped being updated/supported in July 2020)?

[AGTDenton]

Sorry to piggy back into another's thread but I thought this might be relevant to what's gone before:

A quick read of a few tech guides suggest Virtual box is more versatile than hyper V and easier to select what the VM has access to - in my case GPU resource will be important.

I'm installing virtual box (this would be in a win10 environment hence this thread) to try out some software for work ahead of splashing on licences and virtual box has this line on it's site:



What is software virtualization as I assumed that would just mean the virtual machine itself, which it sounds like it can't be. So how do I know if I need that feature, does some software need special things to allow it to work in a virtual machine? Is this a niche thing I can ignore and just install the latest version of 6.1 or should I go with 6.0 (which stopped being updated/supported in July 2020)?

See if this helps answer your question: official 6.0 documentation
https://docs.oracle.com/en/virtualiz...in/hwvirt.html

What processor do you have?

[ik9000]

See if this helps answer your question: official 6.0 documentation
https://docs.oracle.com/en/virtualiz...in/hwvirt.html

What processor do you have?

I was literally just reading that exact article as you posted it - spooky! But I still don't get it. This would be on ryzen 9 3900x, msi ACE with 32GB ram (so intend to set VM at 8GB, or 12GB if anything grumbles) I have set the bios to allow cpu virtualisation (I think the setting was SMV -> enabled)

edit: ok, my best attempt at summarising that - modern processors do hardware virtualisation, which is more robust, so start with the newest version of Virtual Box and see what happens. Older processors without virtualisation may need an older virtual box to allow software virtualisation instead.

Is that fair?

[AGTDenton]

In which case definitely go with the newer version.
You'll want to enable virtualization technology to allow x64 guests anyway.

In essence software virtualization is there for CPUs lacking the virtualization technology.
Some modern Pentium, i3s and i5s lack the hardware virtualization, for example the ultra low power variants but you'll be in good hands with yours. These days laptops come with it as standard.