Blown away by VMWare Workstation 8 Performance

[Jon]

Hey guys,

I am absolutely blown away at the performance of VMWare Workstation 8 in conjunction with my hardware, check this out:

Here's the VM host specs:
i7 2600k Stock
16GB RAM
Geforce 560GTX ti
RAID0 - 2x 1TB 7200RPM SATA3 drives.

I was running these virtual machines simultaneously:

Vista x86 - 2GB RAM | 1 vCPU
Ubuntu 11.10 x64 - 2GB RAM | 1vCPU
Windows 8 Dev Preview x64 - 2GB RAM | 2 vCPU's
Windows 7 x64 - 1GB RAM | 2 vCPU's
Mac OSX Snow Leopard - 2GB RAM | 2 vCPU's
Windows 7 x64 - 8GB RAM | 4 vCPU's

Now get this, I was running Deus Ex: HR at 60fps on the last VM listed above, it was fully playable. Granted, not all VM's were consuming all system resources but I think it's a testament to how well Workstation 8 manages the resources it has available to it.
While everything was running I was switching back and forth between the different VM's and couldn't see any performance problems. The thing that really blew me away was the 3D performance, this is the first time I had tried out the so called gimmicky 3D acceleration and it felt like gaming was 'native' as if I were playing on a regular desktop. That said, switching back and forth between the various VM's I did notice some weird mouse issues, but it wasn't a train-smash.

Aside from all of this, I moved over from using Virtual PC to using VMWare for a number of reasons but primarily because Virtual PC seems to be lacking a lot of higher end features that are present in VMWare Workstation 8. In so doing this migration of all the x86 VM's I had in Virtual PC, specifically my Vista x86 VM, I am now being prompted to re-activate (even though it's a legit license). Vista x86 is activated in the Virtual PC VM but not activated in the VMWare Workstation 8 VM, does anybody know how I can transfer the activation from one VM to the other? I, unfortunately, have an OEM license so I feel I may be SOL.

[Forge]

Virt PC and VMware expose different BIOSes to the VMs, and so appear to be different motherboards. This is triggering activation.

If you are satisfied with your legal status, and wish to engage in safe but legally unclear solutions, I'd be happy to discuss them, but not here in the forum (PM me).

According to MS, the OEM version is only to be sold/purchased with hardware, and the legality of the license is tied to that hardware. If you bought that OEM license standalone, you may be in legally murky areas.

[siberx]

If you call up microsoft with the prompted activation number you can simply tell them that you had to change the motherboard on the system because it failed; even with an OEM license you're allowed to replace failed components within the same system without an issue. We used to do this all the time when replacing failed motherboards at my old job; they never gave us any trouble. That's effectively what you've done here, from a virtual perspective - the old virtualization "motherboard" was replaced with a VMware one