Use Windows from a USB stick using VMware or other

Just curious to know if anyone has had luck with this (or if it's common):

If I have a 32 or 64GB flash drive (USB stick), is it possible to run a pretty basic Windows XP/7/8 installation using VMware player or another version of VMware? For example, if someone has a laptop capable of running VMs, I'd like to be able to either quickly install the VMware Player and then run the Windows VM from the stick (to not have to utilize the host's hard drive space beyond the VMware installation), or, ideally, boot from the USB stick either directly into Windows or into a lightweight hypervisor (such as VMware Player) where I can then load my Windows VM from the stick (which would be even less intrusive to the host PC).

This would be beneficial in that I could always have a personal computer handy on a keychain or in my pocket as long as someone nearby has a machine capable of running VMs.

Is there a step-by-step on how to do this?

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Comments

cknapp78

I know you can do it using VirtualBox. As seen here...

How to Install and Run Windows 7 from USB Flash Drive

Google is your friend.

Corey

Asif Dasl

Your best bet is to run Windows 8 from a USB drive, it acts just like a normal installation so you can put anti-virus on it etc.. from there you could run VMware workstation/VirtualBox/Hyper-V. There was a restriction that you could not access the Windows Store but I don't know if that is gone with 8.1, there may be other restrictions that I don't know about (can you run Hyper-V on it?).