As best I can tell, power management (of the sort that runs on notebook computers) and virtual machines don’t mix very well. From one notebook computer to the next, the way in which power management information — for example, how much battery life is left — is accurately bubbled up into the Windows interface usually involves some technology that differs from one notebook manufacturer to the next. Whenever standards don’t exist for certain implementations of hardware (eg: a notebook’s power infrastructure), virtual machines are going to have a tough time probing those implementations for information that the end-user find useful.

So, practically speaking, what’s the problem? One of the very cool things about VM technology is that if you’re running multiple VMs at the same time, you can toggle between them while staying in full screen mode. In other words, if let’s say, you are running Windows XP in a VM, you can run it in a way that it takes over your computer’s entire display. In fact, while in the full screen mode, passers-by would probably look at your computer and think it’s running XP (when in fact, the real host operating system is Vista or Linux). This is how I run my VMs. Switching between them is easy. When I press CTRL-ALT-RightArrow, my display is overtaken by the next active VM. For me, with only two VMs running, the CTRL-ALT-RightArrow keystroke is like a toggle between the two VMs. Cool, eh? (sidebar: CTRL-ALT-RightArrow is also the keystroke combination that rotates a TabletPC’s screen orientation by 90 degrees. With my tablet, sometimes, CTRL-ALT-RightArrow toglgles between VMs. Other times, it rotates the screen orientation. Ugh.)

Get the whole piece at:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=583&tag=nl.e539