A match made in heaven

The fundamental characteristics of PMS: light weight, small footprint, simplicity, hardened security, high availability; means it's well suited for Virtual PC, both as a host OS and as a guest OS.

As a light-weight host OS

When running as host OS for Virtual PC, PMS is essentially a near-bare-metal hypervisor, with the bonus of all the usual amenities of a workstation OS, such as: ghost, network access, etc.; without the liability of its bulk and vulnerabilities. This is indeed one of the areas where the specialized VMware bare-metal server edition is superior over Virtual PC. PMS serves as a 20/80 solution for that cost-sensitive niche.

As a lean guest OS

The small footprint of guest OS reduces resource drain (CPU, memory and hard disk) on the host, and allows the packing of many more guest instances into a single box. This is ideal for server consolidation scenarios. It is also feasible to implement a soft/virtual version of "blade" server. Obviously, a lean guest also means lightening fast image deployment, restoration and migration.

Amazing miniature-size deployment image

Our standard-issue compressed VHD image of an XP Pro domain workstation weigh in at 105M. Upon deployment the VHD is at 260M. This is only made possible in conjunction with our proprietary process of coordinated defrag scheme, traversing both the host and guest OSs.

Single instance application isolation

When coupled with special "singlepc" mode and auto-logon, we can launch a guest OS instance with dedicated application, sans VPC console and extra VPC-related interaction. This provides a transparent user experience and eliminates extra training, while gaining the benefits of security afforded by true isolation. Activating virtualization integration hardware support (a feature painstakingly retained and preserved in PMS) and installation of VPC Add-ons, result in the isolated application running at 99% native speed.