Virtual Server 2005 on Windows XP

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Technically Virtual Server 2005 is not supported on Windows XP but it will happily coexist with Virtual PC 2004 on the same machine which is great if you need to test scenarios and don't have a server machine at your disposal. For me it means I can do all my demo's on my Toshiba tablet. Sweet! I want to thank a colleague of mine in the UK, John Howard (no not the Aussie PM). John is an ITE like me in our UK sub and he has a blog as well. I've put the link on my homepage. Check it out as he has a lot of good stuff up there.

So what do you have to do to run both these products on XP. Well you have to install IIS of course and if you don't secure IIS with the IIS lockdown tool then all will be fine. However once you run this tool you will get a '404 server not found error. To fix this you have to modify the urlscan.ini file to allow .EXE'S to be served by IIS. So do the following:

  • Navigate to \windows\system32\inetsrv\urlscan and open urlscan.ini
  • Find this section:

; Deny executables that could run on the server

.exe

.bat
.cmd
.com
.dll

Remove or remark the .EXE part and restart the IIS admin server and hey presto the Virtual Server 2005 Admin page will work fine now.

Thanks again to John in the UK for this tip!