How to reverse Windows 7 hosting CentOS VMware image?

Question

My development environment is CentOS 5.5 x64 running under VMware hosted within a Windows 7 x64 environment. This is "alright" but the VMware image isn't very responsive even with 2 cores and 3GB of RAM so I was thinking about reversing it so that CentOS was the host and Windows was a guest (using VirtualBox). I only use Outlook and Office under Windows and cannot use open source alternatives as I need to talk to my corporate colleagues.

I have some questions:

1. Can I "transfer" the Windows license from my real machine to my virtual machine?
2. Will I notice any difference in performance doing this?
3. Has anyone else successfully done this?

My machine is a Dell Studio XPS Desktop 435MT with a Core i7 920 and 6GB of RAM.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

1. Yes you can do that. The license of a virtual system is the same as usual.
2. I think you will, the main OS should run much more efficient than a virtual box system.
3. I'm using ubuntu 10 in a virtual box under windows 7 for testing, and also had a ubuntu only pc, the performance difference was enormous.

OT: A small personal advice, don't use Outlook in any way, it has very dangerous security issues.