gregctaylor

It is correct that Windows Data Centre on 2008 entitles you to use Hyper-V with as many virtual hosts as you want. Note, though, that this will mean you are now running Server2008 in the enterprise so you will need 2008 cals on all your desktops. It is also difficult to run Hyper-V without MSVCC which is priced per host. Free VMWare does not provide V-Motion or great things like High Availability. ESX is priced per physical processor. Don't forget, though, that if, say, you needed 4 physical hosts then that means 8 in Hyper-V (it uses Windows clustering) but only 5 in VMWare as it just needs a spare. Another option would be Citrix Xenserver which is free and provides Xenmotion (i.e. vMotion on the Xen) but not HA - that comes with Xen essentials which you purchase per host. Again, 4 hosts would only need 1 spare. Greg

That it a very interesting point. I can only see a reason to install Aero as a PC. Did MS think it might be a solution to Vista bloatware? If I were setting up a PC as a domain controller and DNS only then I would set up server core and install server core configurator. (Windows Server Core - CoreConfigurator to the rescue - Windowmaker's blog)

I would add a 512MB write-back cache to the SCSI controller as it makes a massive performance boost. An alternative is to split your bill in two, drop the server to 2 small disks (RAID 0+1) then put the fast disks in a second machine and create a SAN using iSCSI? Starwind is brilliant using the iSCSI software in Windows. You would need to add an additional network card to your main server and make that the SAN network. Just a thought.

There are a couple of recent posts which also suggest you can service pack and hotfix to solve the problem. This is a useful blog: John Howard - Hyper-V and virtualization blog : Controlling Hyper-V VMs in Virtual Machine Connection over TS/Remote Desktop without a mouse I should have said that the issue was the mouse. Server 2008 was so impressive that I gave up looking to see if there was a fix. Perhaps MS should have released a desktop licence? In normal circumstances it is stupid to pay more for the licence than for the PC or laptop!

I use this at work. We are testing Windows Hyper-V and you can only RDP to Server 2008 using Vista or another server2008. As we are all XP (and staying that way) then I tried the server2008 as a PC route. Performance is amazing on a single 3GHz processor and 1GB RAM. I applied the latest graphics card driver and now have it running the full Aero desktop with little apparent speed difference. I gather that Windows 7 is supposed to be close to the performance of server2008 - let's hope so. Greg

One I missed was to ensure any custom Outlook forms had been copied across. If you have created any then send yourself one of each as it is easy to then rebuild any lost forms from an original. I annoyed a LOT of my users when I did not do this!

I would be interested in the Psion if it is still available? Greg