Linux Gains Two New Virtualization Solutions 170
An anonymous reader writes "The upcoming 2.6.23 kernel has gained two new virtualization solutions. According to KernelTrap, both Xen and lguest have been merged into the mainline kernel. These two virtualization solutions join the already merged KVM, offering Linux multiple ways to run multiple virtual machines each running their own OS."
So, will it run Windows? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Re:So, will it run Windows? (Score:5, Informative)
You mean Lguest? FTA:
Lguest doesn't do full virtualization: it only runs a Linux kernel with lguest support.
So the answer is no, Lguest does not run Windows. Xen runs Windows, but only if you have a VT-capable processor. Like Lguest, Xen can run Linux without a VT-capable processor.
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MODS ON CRACK (Score:2)
That was a perfectly legitimate question (and one that I'd have asked, too). Right now, most people install VMWare to run Windows on their Linux hosts. I'd be quite pleased to be able to run it using standard, Free, built-in functionality.
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The question remains why run both windows and linux? I run windows for ease of game playing (yes i know most things can be convinced to work under linux, but it is less time to maintain a windows install than it is to get them working).
My shortest answer: Quickbooks Pro doesn't run under Wine yet, and that's what my accountant uses. For business reasons, it's much easier and cheaper to run Windows in a VM for that lone non-graphic-intensive application than to try to get my accountant to accept something different.
Although Windows is mostly a game OS, it does still have a few important business apps.
Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this will confuse users. Choice is good, yes, but 3 VMs in the kernel? Sounds like overkill.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me started on buses.. PCI, USB, SCSI, IDE, how many do you need?!
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The electrical interface of IDE is certainly a bus, since it connects more than one device to each channel. On the other hand, SATA is not a bus, it is a point-to-point link, which connects exactly one device to each channel.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
That said, you mentioned KVM.. KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). (from here [qumranet.com]). It *is* a hardware driver.
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Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
in this situation the analogy is clear. As time went on, people discovered new designs for virtualization and decided to implement them. Each design has strengths and weaknesses that make them appropriate for different situations. The same is true of hardware buses; older buses tend to be cheaper to implement. There are exceptions, it's probably cheaper (or will soon be cheaper due to economies of scale) to implement PCI-Express at PCI bandwidth than it is to implement PCI itself. It's certainly cheaper to implement firewire than SCSI (in spite of this, there are practically no native firewire storage devices. But anyway.) (And firewire, which goes up to 800MHz which peaks at 100MB/sec, is superior in most ways to anything up to and including LVD SCSI, including speed, simplicity of cabling, etc etc) Can you tell I have an ax to grind?
But anyway, the point is that we have UML, which runs linux as a process; we have this new lguest, which runs linux as a module; we have xen which is full virtualization without a need for VT, we have kvm which is like xen but does need VT, we have vmware which is also pretty much like xen (and doesn't need VT, although I was under the impression newer versions of vmware would take advantage of it if present, for a speed boost.)
There's some other examples too, but these are enough to talk about right now. Suffice to say that each approach has advantages and disadvantages. But they're useful for different things!
For maximum separation, for example, you could have a Linux that ran servers inside of different UML processes. While exploits in UML would still be possible, this would stop a privilege escalation bug in one server from affecting another. I envision a tool that tracks dependencies and generates the UML filesystem images automatically. Syslogging is done through the virtual network, to the syslog on the core system. Want to test a package? A command to run it in a UML might be as simple as running fakeroot. (fakelinux?) You could do all of this with this new lguest system, instead of UML.
Meanwhile, you're still going to need a full virtualization solution to run non-linux operating systems under Linux (at least until a cobsd (see "colinux") comes out - I forgot about that one for a moment) so there's still a purpose for that.
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we have xen which is full virtualization without a need for VT
Actually, Xen uses paravirtualization if VT is not available, and can only run operating systems with Xen guest support in those cases.
we have vmware which is also pretty much like xen (and doesn't need VT, although I was under the impression newer versions of vmware would take advantage of it if present, for a speed boost.)
VMware isn't like Xen, in that it can run unmodified guest operating systems without VT. You are correct in that VMware takes advantage of VT if available.
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Er, I think that's what I meant to say, but clearly I didn't; thank you - I sit corrected.
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--Only prob with FW800 is the physical plug incompatibility (which was a bonus for USB1.1 -> 2.0 users) and lack of widespread installs.
--Some ppl say FW is dying, but I don't believe it. All the movie-editor ppl and such are hardc0re FW fans. (USB2 is Teh Suxor with >1 drive on the bus.)
--On the plus side, you can get an external-drive carrier/enclosure for ~$50-60 that will do FW400, US
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
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Xen does some really cool things, but it has a lot of human overhead in terms of management and maintenance that the other two don't have. Now you get to pick the r
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make xconfig
you can see that the very first option is "code maturity level options", and that there are hundreds of features which are by default NOT TURNED ON and therefore do not show up in "anything resembling a production environment". And I'm not talking about kernel modules here, but things like CONFIG_MATH_EMULATION (under "processor type and features" near the bottom of the page) which
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Only if enabled in the distribution. It doesn't harm anyone to have it available in the kernel source tarball. And both KVM and Lguest are implemented as modules, so if you don't load them, they aren't there.
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Namely, would Windows XP still be able to have sufficient access to the actual video hardware for gaming purposes?
AFAIK, Direct3D support is highly experimental in VMware, and I haven't heard of it being available in any of Xen or KVM (Lguest can only run Linux guests, so Direct3D support is a moot point). So the answer is probably no.
Try running your games under Wine instead. It would probably be a safer bet, but it isn't guaranteed to work especially not without hitches. I've read it has improved a lot since I tried it 4-5 years ago, but it isn't 100% complete yet.
Could somebody clear this up for us? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Could somebody clear this up for us? (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as N solutions are maintained there will be N solutions in the kernel. A solution won't be dropped because it performs worse.. or any other "technical" reason.
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That's a pretty unfortunate situation if the unmaintained code is still actually used by someone. Even if another alternative has come along with a superset of the given features, if they provide different system interfaces--so if it would mean rewriting scripts or applications or retraining users--then the migration can be a pain. And you want people to be able to drop a new kernel into a
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That's a pretty unfortunate situation if the unmaintained code is still actually used by someone.
(...)
That said, yeah, if someone notices that filesystem FooFS has been completely broken for ages and nobody has even noticed, then that's a pretty good argument for dropping it. But even then it's not just because it's unmaintained, it's because at that point you're pretty sure nobody really gives a crap about it.
The Linux kernel *almost never* drops support for any devices/filesystems unless (a) it's INCREDIBLY obsolete and NO ONE is using it, or (b) it's been superseded by something clearly better and there's a straightforward upgrade path.
For example, if you read the kernel changelog summaries on LWN.net, you'll see that support for IBM PC/XT hard disks was only dropped in the last couple years... although they have been obsolete since the late 80s and perhaps literally no one has used them for 5-10 years. And
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Very fishy and intriguing (Score:2)
"The happy theme of today's kvm is the significant performance improvements, brought to you by a growing team of developers. I've clocked kbuild at within 25% of native. This release also introduces support for 32-bit Windows Vista. "
I can't understand why the Linux kernel development team had 'Windows Vista support' as one of the items on their agenda at all. Virtualisation as I understand it, is basically an abstraction of the hardware that is performed in software. Should not all operating systems be designed to work with standard instruction sets, interrupts, registers and memory?
Why should it be the job of a particular kernel or it's VM component to satisfy specific requirements of a specific version of another kernel (the Vista k
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Should it not be the other way round - i.e. for closed-source Vista to be compatible and optimised for the open-source Linux kernel?
Y
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The people who work on this stuff really wouldn't call themselves kernel developers, but ok, whatever. Associating any of the VM stuff with Linus is even more retarded.. what they do in their own modules is none of his fault or concern.
I find the announcement about these VMs is from Linus himself. Besides, it is Linus who decides which components get into the main kernel tree, so he is answerable for any decisions made.
Anyway, some people want to run Vista in a VM on Linux. These VM solutions don't try to virtualize every nook and cranny of the x86 hardware. Vista uses the system level x86 hardware in a slightly different way to XP. As such, it takes some changes to make Vista work.
If Vista has any idiosyncracies, it should be the job of the overpaid, bloated development team in Redmond to iron out the kinks and make it standards-compliant. Why should it be a concern of the Linux kernel development team? Besides, how did these developers gain access to quirky behaviour of Vista?
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I find the announcement about these VMs is from Linus himself. Besides, it is Linus who decides which components get into the main kernel tree, so he is answerable for any decisions made.
Linus puts whatever he wants into his tree, yes. His tree is the defacto "main" kernel tree, yes.
If Vista has any idiosyncracies, it should be the job of the overpaid, bloated development team in Redmond to iron out the kinks and make it standards-compliant. Why should it be a concern of the Linux kernel development team? Besides, how did these developers gain access to quirky behaviour of Vista?
What standards are you talking about exactly? The Intel x86 hardware documentation? I can assure you they are writing their code to those "standards" otherwise their code wouldn't work..
If anything the virtualization guys are the ones who are not implementing the "standards".. as not everything that will run on an x86 processor will run the same way under virtualization. That's simply because it's a lot of
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Ideally. My impression is it doesn't actally work very well without some "cheating" (optimization). For instance VMWare works a lot better if you use the special VMWare video driver on the guest instead of sticking with generic VESA or whatever. Also some timing related issues,
Re:Could somebody clear this up for us? (Score:5, Informative)
They each fill very different niches, so there are very good reasons for having all 3 in the kernel.
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Or they have different advantages for different use cases, which would mean that all of they stays there.
By the way, to merge means to take two things and make one thing of of them. You don't merge out something out of another thing. A better word would probably be split.
As a testament to my lack of knowledge... (Score:2)
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Just like the hardware support for webcams is in the kernel.
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Then there's para-virtualization.. modifying the kernel of the guest OS so you don't even need anything in the kernel. W
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Bash and ls are still userspace. All of these
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Only one hardware branch of the kernel gets compiled, and yes, I know I can choose not to compile many things into the kernel, and do so whenever I compile it.
See the post below you for an answer that was helpful. Compare that to your answer, and figure out how to answer a question instead of trying to belittle someone.
GPU support question (Score:5, Funny)
The only reason I currently have a windows partition at all is for gaming.
Being able to run Windows 3D games in a VM would allow me to move to a Linux-only box and also give me a nice way of:
* managing the way windows keeps grabbing diskspace
* remove the need to go through reinstalling/reactivating windows every 6 months or so
* limiting the damage Windows virusses can do
* limiting all the phone-home comms with Microsoft that windows keeps doing
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Probably the first thing they'll do is make it so X running in a virtual machine can share the same DRM (Direct Rendering Module) as X running on the host. Of course, that's not much good to a Windows guest.
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So do any of these solutions support 3D graphics (nvidia) hardware?
The only reason I currently have a windows partition at all is for gaming.
I recently read an article on the progress of just this. It sounds pretty cool and the initial results are impressive. This combined with the DX->OpenGL Wine code, that I'm sure will be open sourced from the makers of parallels (just had a slashdot story on this), makes for an exciting future for providing hardware acceleration to guest applications.
More information: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~andreslc/vmgl/ [toronto.edu]
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Just buy Cedega and be done with it.
Clarification of these technologies (Score:5, Informative)
Xen - the Linux kernel supports code allowing it to be run as a guest underneath the Xen kernel, all through software. Linux's support for Xen does not make Linux a virtualization platform, only a GUEST for the Xen kernel which sits at Ring-0. (though a "dom0" Linux system can interact intimately with the Xen kernel, it actually sits at Ring-1). I should note that the Xen kernel also supports hardware virtualized domains, though this is unrelated to the patches to Linux.
KVM - the Linux kernel supports virtualization of guests through hardware extensions, this requires supported hardware. Linux becomes the Ring-0 kernel.
lguest - (my understanding is) an unmodified Linux kernel can act as a hyper-supervisor through loading Linux kernels as modules. Linux sits as both Ring-0 (supervisor) and Ring-1 (guests). This is experimental with limited features and only supports Linux guests.
UML - the Linux kernel becomes a userspace program. This allows Linux to run as an executable application/program. With UML, Linux can be compiled for a Linux or Microsoft Windows target. The executing OS sits at Ring-0 and the UML program sits at Ring-1. This has the advantage of requiring no modifications to the host OS and is very portable (you could email an entire Linux system to a friend without requiring anything installed to their system), but the disadvantage of poor performance.
From a high-level, the products UML, Xen, and lguest are actually very similar in function. They act as architectures to which Linux can be compiled in order to make it a guest OS of another Ring-0 kernel. These architectures provide the targets of a kernel module (lguest), a userspace program (UML), or a xen-domU guest (Xen). On the other hand, KML is the only patch that is intended to add support to Linux to act as a Ring-0 kernel on behalf of guest systems -- and even then, KML can be viewed more as a hardware driver for the processor extensions.
Re:Clarification of these technologies (Score:5, Informative)
The UML program sits at ring-3 on X86 machines: it's just a normal user program using the ptrace() mechanism and extensions [except when the host has been patched with SKAS, but even here it's just a "normal user program". Rumor has it that SKAS might eventually make it into mainline, but it's time in 'real soon now' is starting to rival Duke Nukem Forever's.]. Rings 1 and 2 are odd, rarely used (IIRC there's the current virtualization craze and OS/2 as notable consumers) features of the x86, derived from MULTICS. For processors with only two (user & supervisor) modes, identify ring 0 with supervisor mode and the other rings with user mode.
It is a little odd to say that Linux "becomes" the Ring-0 kernel under KVM. It was already running in ring 0.
Re:Clarification of these technologies (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally I like the approach of OpenVZ [openvz.org] and VServer [linux-vserver.org] better. The main OS and the guests all share the same kernel, share the RAM and their root filesystems can be just subdirectories of the host's filesystem. When inside the virtual server you don't realize that though. You only see your own processes and everything works as if it was a dedicated server. You can run iptables, reboot and just about everything you could normally do in XEN/KVM/VMWare. Including live migration of virtual servers to other physical hosts. chroot on steroids.
I really hope OpenVZ and/or VServer will be merged at some point. VServer seem to keep up with current kernel releases so that wouldn't be too hard to merge I guess. OpenVZ usually have a lag of something like half a year.
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yes!! (Score:2)
Anybody running OS/2 Warp 4 under linux? (Score:2)
How freakin' big is the Linux kernel now? (Score:2)
Unless they're running a virtualized cluster of machines!
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Wireless card??? WTF? (Score:2)
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If you NAT your VM network traffic, then things work (well sorta, with all the nastiness that NAT comes with).
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This [launchpad.net] is the Ubuntu bug report (note the length and number of duplicates) which actually breaks apt on installation, but it's not Ubuntu specific; you can't configure it manually with this wireless card either. The only solution is to disable networking virtualization, which means I can't even have VMware use my wired connection unless I disable the wireless card entirely or physically remove it fro
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Then Lguest is not for you, since it requires a guest kernel with Lguest support, which Windows most certainly don't have, or will ever have.
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KVM can run Linux on Linux or Windows on Linux, but it needs special hardware, just like Xen.
Soooooo, if you wish to do Windows on Linux and you don't have special hardware, then you are pretty much limited to VMware Server and Qemu (Virtualbox).
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Re:Multiple ways to run Multiple OSs (Score:4, Informative)
I used to work for a search engine company (not Google) that has thousands of linux servers. After doing a bit of research they discovered that the vast majority of these machines are idle for a good amount of time. Rather than buy new servers they simply installed Xen and intellegently divided up the physical hardware to perform their different tasks. Now instead of separate physical servers to do web spidering, data analysis, log processing, etc. they've combined these tasks onto the same physical hardware but kept them as individual virtual servers.
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I wonder why all the Linux priests here on the dot don't get that Virtualization is the magic key to drive Linux adoption among the typical Windows luser crowd. Since VMware Server was free, I've converted almost *everybody* I help with computers to kubuntu with VMware running a XP VM
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That's probably the worst thing you could possibly do to a home user, if someone wants Linux they can decide for themselves, pushing it on people even if you help them resolve problems, is a bad idea, one that i hope doesn't need to be explained to you.
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And I think you're not considering my target audience enough. We're talking about people who have no clue whatsoever and just want to surf the web, write e-mail, rip their music CDs to MP3s and listen to them, and maybe some misc stuff l
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I just hope you didn't friend me as a Linux priest, because I'm not. I'm from the "use the best tool for the job" crowd and just getting *very* pragmatic with age. Personally, I use OSX at work and Linux/FreeBSD at home, but that's really only because they fit my usage patterns best. I was on Windows quite a long time, and still use it at work for, say, 10-20% of the time. I'm just getting sick and tired of it, because compared to the alternatives, it has really
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** 1 : selecting what appears to be best in various doctrines, methods, or styles
2 : composed of elements drawn from various sources; also : HETEROGENEOUS
( Courtesy m-w.com )
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http://www.nomachine.com/ [nomachine.com]
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Mind you, I'm curious, not trolling.
And: My pet peeve is that the VMware Server console on the
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Solved it three different ways! (Score:2)
Please review Robert Frost: "The Road Not Taken [amandashome.com]".
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Why what? Why multiple virtualization solutions? Because each solution has its own advantages and disadvantages. Use the solution that fits your needs best.
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So the comparisment with emacs is very inaccurate, emacs is a userland tool, and doesn't have kernel modules
Re:I RTFA twice and thought to myself... (Score:5, Funny)
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Linux + Xen + W2K lets her leave the windows desktop and still use these tools.
Pretty straightforward.
Yes.
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I only have Ubuntu installed and I don't see why a VM is such a massive feature these days?
I have vmware installed and use it on a regular basis. Here's what for:
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So, Joe user may not need this, but it's a major feature for the people who work on improving the Linux kernel. That alone justifies including these features.
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Virtual machines can be very useful in the server room, especially those with advanced features such as live migration. A guest can be migrated between different hosts without shutting the guest down. It was previously quite common to run each service on its own computer, and still is, but now we can run these services on its own virtual machines instead, making each system fairly clean and only used for one service.
Several different virtual machines can run on one host, making it possible to aggregate ma
VMs are handy. (Score:2)
The first is Linux system, Ubuntu, for running tools that aren't available for Windows and web site testing. Technically the OSS DBs, PHP, and Apache have Windows builds, but the pathing and other differences are bothersome, especially if the ultimate goal is to run the site on a Linux server.
The second is a bare bones Windows partition where I test suspect websites or software. Clients ask me to quickly evaluate a pro
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I just upgraded my wife on Debian Sarge testing with a Win4Lin 2.4-27 kernel. Web designer who demanded PhotoShop, Illustrator, Flash, and IE but the Win98 Win4Lin base and apps were getting dated. Did a dist upgrade to Etch Stable and installed XP Pro on QEMU with kqemu. Was good. The kqemu performance was very adequate, net, samba share and got her apps working.
But then I upgraded to Etch testing. First
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QEMU has so far been a solid foundation for a handful of other FOSS virtualisation solutions, KVM use a modified Qemu (Does anyone know if KVM support is going upstream into the next QEMU release?) and Virtualbox incorporated QEMU to establish full system emulation on top of their own hypervisor. If anything I'd like to see the Virtualbox OSE kernel module merged, which imo is far superior to raw QEMU+KQE
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if I recall correctly, the EULA for Vista forbids running in a virtualised environment.
At least the Enterprise and Ultimate editions are okay per the EULA to run in a virtualized environment, but I'm not sure about the rest. I faintly recall Microsoft being opposed to using the same copy of the cheaper editions as both the host and the guest OS. It is possible that it is legal to run a separately purchased copy as a guest in a virtual machine.
IANAL though, and I don't have Vista, so I cannot check its EULA.