With either Virtual PC 2007 (VPC 2007) or Virtual Server 2005 (VS 2005), you
can install and run multiple operating systems simultaneously. VPC 2007 is
tuned for desktop operation and is easier to use than VS 2005; however, it
will use the same single core to run all your virtual machines at the same
time; this is clearly something that you don't want so you should use VS
2005 instead.
Also, VPC 2007 doesn't offer support anymore for Win95 officially but you
shouldn't have any real problem. For the latest beta version of VS 2005, I
don't know about its official support for Win95. The principal advantage of
having an official support is that you can add what we call "Additions" for
the guest operating system. These additions make the virtualized operating
system running easier and faster. For Win95, the easy solution is simply to
use the older additions from VPC 2004 if you want to run it under VPC 2007.
For VS 2005, I think that the latest beta has still these additions but I'm
not sure; however, using those of VPC 2004 shouldn't be a problem either.
Both VPC 2007 and VS 2005 are free; so you don't risk anything to try them.
VMWare is also offering many virtualisation solutions, either free or not;
so you might want to take a look at their site.
Your only problem is the legal licensing requirements for Win95: for each
copy of Win95 running in a virtualized environment, you must have a legal
license (ie. 4 copies running = 4 licenses needed).
Newsgroups:
microsoft.public.virtualpc
microsoft.public.virtualserver
See also
http://www.vmware.com/products/home.html
and
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/GuestOS_guide.pdf
One last note: you can install both VPC 2005 and VS 2005 on the same machine
but you cannot do the same with both VMWare Workstation (not free) and the
VMWare Server (free); so in the later case, you will have to remove one
before installing the other.
