Hyper-V 2012 Onto Bare Metal Or Server 2012 with Hyper-V As a Role?

[AndyCan]

I'm looking at purchasing a server with Server 2012. I intend to run 2 VM's on this server so what is the best approach?

 

-To install Hyper-V straight onto bare metal then run my 2 VM's from there

 

OR

 

-Install Server 2012 with the Hyper-V role and then run my 2 VM's?

 

What are the pluses and negatives for each approach?

 

Thanks.

[SYNACK]

It just comes down to licencing, if you already have datacentre or even two copies of standard you can just install one as the host and two guest partitions. The windows licence gets you a GUI on the host if you want it, if you are installing core its basically the same.

 

If you are looking at clustering later on and only have standard now using hyper-v base could be better as it has the clustering stuff built in where as I don't think standard does.

[DavidTomic]

 

If you are looking at clustering later on and only have standard now using hyper-v base could be better as it has the clustering stuff built in where as I don't think standard does.

 

It does in Server 2012.

 

In 2008/R2 you needed to have the Enterprise/Datacenter versions if you wanted to use clustering, but in Server 2012 that's now all included in the Standard license.

[m25man]

2012 Standard Licence now allows for 2 x Virtual Instances (as long as the host is not used for any other roles except Hyper-V, Core or GUI)

The core installation obviously uses less system resources on the host leaving more available for use by the VMs

The Hyper-V role on a GUI host makes it easier to manage directly from the Host itself.

As I tend to do most of my management over VPNs to multiple sites from mobile devices I find the full GUI more useful.