Isn't windows "Installing new hardware" every time you boot? And the license is still active? I was always affraid it will break the system after few switches between virtual and bare-metal boot.

I've been running this setup since 2017 and while there were occasional graphical and sound glitches, usually after a Windows update, over all it works great. It did the "installing new hardware" thing only after updates as well, so I didn't run into it too often.

It does like to deactivate itself after a few reboots, but that's nothing a bit of mild piracy can't fix. I have at least two spare windows licenses in a drawer so I don't feel the least bit bad about it.

I also have a big ugly powershell script that runs during startup and does some things differently depending on where it's running. Things like not launching all my background stuff in the VM, remapping drive letters between physical disks and VM folder shares...

Another thing to look into is RemoteApp. I did some experiments with it in a VM and the performance was way better than "seamless mode" (which doesn't exist anymore anyways), but getting it to work on non-Server editions is a pain.

Seamless mode still exists in Virtualbox 6.1 which is the latest version.

(Windows did just crash when I was testing it but, as it also crashed twice before I got that far, I don't think it's related)

Did Windows 10 start to crash in VBox for you too? I had to move to libvirt/qemu as I was not able to resolve. Downgrading nor upgrading VirtualBox did not help. Removing last windows update helped a little, then it started crashing again.

Installing new hardware doesn't happen often and it shows the unlicensed watermark when booted from Virtualbox, but booting natively restores the activation status.

Nah, when Windows installs new hardware it doesn't uninstall the old hardware. Good luck on the license front though, since Microsoft has decided you can't move around the item you purchased from them...

I have a libvirt VM running Windows with GPU passthrough to the GTX1070 (the main GPU is the RTX 2070 Super) and use looking-glass-client and scream to pass the audio to Linux, which I use for gaming. No need to even multi boot, though I do still have the Windows boot available if I need it, which is rarely.

how is the latency on audio with that setup? I use qemu with GPU passthrough, 1060 on linux and 1070 on windows for a few years now, and i had to buy a laptop to do music production because of the latency. The only other solution was to passthrough a USB soundcard, but about 15 years ago i discovered i can't actually play live notes on a MIDI device with the latency on the USB subsystem.

I've heard of looking glass, but not scream. Will check out, regardless of reply, so thanks!

I don't /perceive/ any audio latency, the game sound seems fine to me. Talking about Elite: Dangerous specifically - I use the VM to develop my E:D 3rd party application.

Yes, I do it too, but getting it to work is a bit tricky with UEFI.