Running more than a couple of virtual machines, or doing so without violating the no-commercial-use requirement in the license, means you need VMware Workstation, which can be purchased here. It's mainly designed to compete with XP Mode in Windows 7-a Virtual PC session running within Microsoft's newest operating system to let customers run older applications without putting off migration to the new OS.

It's not designed to compete with Citrix or remote session-based virtual desktops. It's designed primarily to allow customers to run several operating systems on the same hardware, not to support multiple desktops running from one machine.

VMware Player, free for personal use and downloadable here, includes a hypervisor and some very basic creation- and management tools. What You'll Need The first thing you need, for the purposes of this article, at least, is a Windows-based PC and a copy of either VMware Workstation or VMware Player, VMware's two lowest-cost versions of the virtual desktop. Perhaps you'd just like to separate your work-at-home and personal home computing environments.

Perhaps you'd like one VM to be used by the children in your family, so that any settings changes or trouble would be confined to that VM, for example. It's not difficult to set up an x86 machine-which are more Mighty Mouse than mini in terms of power these days-in a small office or home office to run multiple VMs.

How to run virtual pc on work pc