We do all development of CRM solutions in virtual nachines. With CRM 3.0 and 4.0 I used Virtual PC but as CRM 2011 requires a 64-bit OS that meant Virtual PC was no longer an option.
The choices were either to install Windows 2008 server on my laptop or use another hypervisor. We trialled VirtualBox under Windows 7 and it worked OK, although I missed some of the features from virtual PC such as drag and drop between desktops.
The issue is that the virtual machines that Microsoft provides for training and demos are all Hyper-V, as is our hosted CRM platform, which made it hard to demo CRM or test upgrades on my laptop.
When Microsoft announced that Hyper-V was going to be included in Windows 8 client I thought finally would be able to have a single set of virtual machines.
Hyper-V works on Windows 8 fine but I still have a load of VirtualBox images for current projects and I couldn’t get VirtualBox images to start. I tried stopping the Hyper-V service but this didn’t make a difference so ended up removing the Hyper-V feature and then VirtualBox worked.
So I it looks like I can only have one hypervisor installed at any one time. I am going to convert all my VDI files to VHD files, uninstall VirtualBox, add Hyper-V back in and import the virtual machines into Hyper-V. This will take a while!
One more thing; Hyper-V doesn’t like the virtual disks being compressed which is what I have used for Virtual PC and VirtualBox so I will either need a larger hard disk or I will need to cull some VMs.
Useful info, thanks Julian. I think I’ll stick to VirtualBox for now.