Possbly Stupid VM Question

[Ben]

A couple of my VMs run on XP, mostly because I had the spare full install versions hanging around the house. With End of Life around the corner for XP, I wanted to make at least one of the VMs into a Win7 (or, I can't believe I'm saying this) Win8 machine.

I have no spare full installs of Win7 available. I want to save some money. Are there any negative implications to putting an OEM install on a VM versus a universal full install? I know there should be no issues on the initial install, but if I want to wipe and reinstall? I'm unsure as to how OEMs lock to hardware versus how VMs read hardware. I've only used OEM versions on work machines that I setup as data collectors, so the install stays with the device until the hardware craps out.

Before anyone says to use it, I already run a couple of Linux VMs.

[AZRedhawk44]

What hypervisor are you using?

Windows can tell if the hypervisor back-end changes, for a subordinate guest VM.  And it'll prompt you to re-activate, just as if you cloned a hard drive or replaced a motherboard.  Microsoft VirtualPC and HyperV and VMWare's software both allow/encourage this behavior.  VirtualBox used to be a bit more flexible in this regard, but Oracle has taken over development of that tool and I think they also have been enabling the license police.

I'm of the opinion that if I bought a license and choose to apply it to a VM, I should have 100% portability of that installation to any hardware I want, though licensing of the physical hardware OS is a responsibility independent of the guest VM's license.

[Ben]

What hypervisor are you using?

Oh yeah, sorry, using Virtualbox. Host machine is Win7.

[AZRedhawk44]

I think the client OS "integration features" are what enable this detection of hypervisor changes.  Just like a suite of drivers for mobo, nic, etc.  Otherwise the guest OS will just generic HAL drivers and should be unable to gather any unique identifier of its hypervisor host.

[GigaBuist]

I have done OEM installs of XP discs to a Virtualbox VM multiple times.  I found no restriction problems.  These were licences purchased by us (not sure how my brother did that) for install on our own physical hardware.  Forward 5-6 years later and I ditched all of the physical XP machines and reused the activation keys on VM installs.