Can I upgrade clone of XP VM to Win 7

Hello,

I am running Parallels 7 on a new Mac Book Pro 10.7 Lion. I currently have a Win XP VM and a clone of it. On the first one I have SQL Server installed and on the second one I have Oracle installed. These 2 VM's have no need to access the internet at all and I do not access the internet from them. I don't care if they get Windows Updates, etc.

I bought a Windows 7 Upgrade 3-pack for my wife and son and upgraded them already. I did NOT upgrade my own XP machine before I transferred it over to my Mac/Parallels setup.

The question is: can I make another clone and then upgrade that clone only to Windows 7? If I do will I still be able to run my XP VM's with the databases on them? I guess it's a Windows licensing question mostly.

Regards,
mallethead

 

You can clone the VM and upgrade it - cloning is the usual way of making a manual backup, so cloned VM always behaves fine and the initial one continues to work as well

 

YanaYana,

Thanks for the reply. I was worried that Windows would be checking serial numbers and once upgraded to Windows 7 the old Win XP VM's would not be able to start up because Windows would check for a conflict.

I'll give it a try this weekend.

Thanks, Mallethead

 

Actually, in terms of licensing, no, you can't legally do that.
XP will likely (not sure) fail genuine validation on the next update it runs that check.