Boot to VHD from another workstation machine

Question

I have a windows server 2008 R2 machine which has some VHD files. I have a laptop using win 7. Can I configure my laptop to boot to a virtual on the windows server 2008 R2 server?

These machines are not on a domain but on the same workstation, and the machines can find each other on the network.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Windows 7 allows you to add a VHD file to the boot menu, and then boot off that VHD.

Windows 8 allows you to attach (using disk management) a VHD off the network and have the partitions on that VHD appears as local disks (with drive letters).

However for a remote VHD to be used at boot time would require the Win7 kernel pieces that loads the VHD's OS to include enough components to be a client to a file server (network stack, authentication/authorisation, ...). Therefore I doubt this would work.

You could try it and write your own answer here.