Fun with virtualization
Part one of my home computing infrastructre is done. I am moving from the free VMWare Server to Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta (thanks to my Technet subscription). VMWare Server is nice, but a little slow. Hyper-V is something I’ve wanted to play with for a while, but I was also considering VMWare ESXi, which is a free version of their enterprise ESX server. I settled on Hyper-V moved everything off my server onto my Drobo.
Under VMWare Server, my server was laid out like this diagram. The base OS was Gentoo Linux running with a 32-bit kernel, and I ran Windows 2008 Server and XP Pro as virtual machines. I used Gentoo for file serving and general playing around in Linux. XP Pro was a virtualized version of my old desktop and ran iTunes for my AppleTV. Server 2008 was a recent install so I could play around with Active Directory. Under the old setup, that’s about all I could run and the VMs were slow.
With Hyper-V, I considered using it as a bare-metal hypervisor, but I don’t have a Vista machine to manage it. I’ve got Server 2008 running as another domain controller, and used this converter on the VMWare hard drive files of my Server 2008 and XP VMs. The converter worked flawlessly. After the VMWare files were now .vhd files, I made new virtual machines using the hard drives. Things with flawlessly with the Server 2008 VM, but I had video problems with XP. The Live Mesh client was preventing the video from displaying in anything other than 4-bit color. Uninstalling Live Mesh fixed the problem, and it’s working now.
The next steps are to organize all the files I dumped on my drobo and set up my AppleTV again. I’ll try and post about the final setups after all they are finished.
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