http://live.pirillo.com/ – Community members Sven writes:

I'm running Vista as a host machine and Virtual PC 07 which has XP Pro installed on it. The virtual hard drive is saved on an 80GB partition separate from any Vista files. If my XP caught a virus or some nasty spyware on it could it transfer itself onto my Vista partitions or will it be regulated to just the virtual PC?

This depends on how your Virtual Machine is set up and what infection you get. If your VM is networked in any way to your real machine it is possible that the infection could spread via that network connection.

Also, it's possible that viruses and spyware are being authored to exploit flaws in virtual machine software. While it appears to be theoretical right now, this is something you should keep in mind.

The best thing you can do to safeguard yourself from an infection on your real machine is to not network that virtual machine at all: don't share folders, don't let it see your real machine on the network, and in fact, remove its Internet connectivity.

As always, make sure you are running antivirus on both your real and virtual machines.

Community member Icy chimes in:

As per your video a couple days ago on using Virtual PC on a Vista machine to prevent against viruses, a friend of mine did get a virus that hacked through the virtual machine (he was using vmware player) and infected his hard drive. Besides transmitting a virus from a virtual machine over the network, is it possible that if a virus wrote a bunch of bits of data to RAM and overflowed the allocated RAM for the virtual machine, that extra bits would be written to RAM allocated to the real machine. Then, those bits could potentially be executed, transmitting the virus to the physical machine. Is this possible? Is there another way a virus could exploit a vulnerability in VMWare or any virtual machine while running on a virtual machine?

Do you have any advice for Sven?

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Apple is prepping Boot Camp for Leopard inclusion next year. I wouldn’t be surprised if they soon figured out how to enable Windows apps to run “natively” in OS X. CodeWeavers already has CrossOver Mac, which pretty much does that now. Dual booting is for geeks, though I believe that VMWare and Parallels will keep everybody but the gamers happy. I just learned about 2X ApplicationServer tonight:

2X ApplicationServer for Windows Terminal Services allows Windows applications to be tunneled seamlessly onto remote desktops, saving on administration & support. ou can use it to seamlessly tunnel up to 5 applications per server onto remote desktops – perpetually. During the first 30-days it also allows you to tunnel an unlimited number of applications.

Though I believe 2X’s cross-platform / network setup is still somewhat of a kludge, this is certainly a step in the right direction. Dunno. The more I look, the more I’m finding OS X equivalents for my favorite Windows programs. Let’s see if Entourage 2008 kills Outlook once and for all.

I do have a coupon for Parallels, though…

CrossOver, Boot Camp, Parallels, VMWare…