Your company must continue using a proprietary 32-bit program that only installs on Windows XP. All employee laptops run Windows 11 64-bit, and policy demands the legacy environment remain isolated from the production network except for manual file transfers. Which solution best allows each user to run the program while meeting these requirements?
Package the application inside a Docker container and run the container on Windows 11.
Subscribe to a cloud-hosted SaaS edition of the accounting program and access it through a web browser.
Install a type-2 hypervisor on each laptop and run a Windows XP virtual machine with host-only networking enabled.
Enable Windows 11 compatibility mode for the installer and run the program directly on the host OS.
Using a hosted (type-2) desktop hypervisor such as Oracle VirtualBox or VMware Workstation Player on each Windows 11 laptop lets users create a self-contained Windows XP virtual machine. The VM emulates the full PC hardware stack, so the legacy 32-bit application installs and runs unmodified. The VM's network adapter can be set to Host-Only (or NAT with no port-forwarding), keeping the guest isolated from the production LAN while still permitting controlled file copies through shared folders or drag-and-drop, which satisfies the security policy.
Containers share the host's Windows 11 kernel, so they cannot boot a Windows XP kernel. Windows compatibility mode merely shims APIs and cannot overcome missing 16-bit subsystems on 64-bit Windows. Subscribing to a SaaS edition would replace, not preserve, the existing application and assumes such a service exists, so it does not meet the stated requirement.
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