To run the Windows 8 Developer Preview as a guest OS, you need a virtualization product that supports it. As many of you know, virtualization is a popular way to try out new operating system products since you don’t have to dedicate a physical machine, add a spare disk, or repartition. Virtual machine products allow you to run a guest OS on top of an existing host OS that runs natively on the physical machine. Today Microsoft has also posted a new topic at Building Windows 8 blog which describes why Windows 8 doesn’t work in some famous virtualization software and which virtualization software you should use to test Windows 8. We are testing it using Oracle VM VirtualBox and it works fine here.Ĭheck out following video which contains a step-by-step demo to show you how to install Windows 8 in Virtual Box: The same thing we are doing with recently released Windows 8 public testing build. If they like it, they install it on their hard disk and start using it as primary OS.

Whenever a new OS is released, most of the people first test it using a virtualization software like VMware Workstation, VirtualBox, Virtual PC, etc. Install and Test Operating Systems Virtually in Windows Using Hyper-V UPDATE: You can now also use the built-in Hyper-V feature of Windows 8 and later to install any desired OS virtually without using any extra 3rd party virtualization software as mentioned in following tutorial:

Vmware vs virtualbox windows guest