Vista - Virtual WHS -- Virtual PC or Virtual Server?

I am planning to set up Windows Home Server in a virtual machine, initially for
experimentation, but perhaps for real. Host will be Windows XP Professional x86.

Should I use virtual PC or Virtual Server? Or would VMWare Server (or
Workstation, which I own) be better?

--
David Wilkinson
Visual C++ MVP

It's not really the best solution to run WHS in a VM, it's pretty
rigid in disk timings and such, but I'd run it on Virtual Server, that
fits the task the best and can be set to always autostart. The only
reason I'd think about running it on VMWare Server is if you wanted to
use raw USB disks, but the performance isn't great that way.

--
Bob Comer



On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 08:21:33 -0500, David Wilkinson
<no-reply@xxxxxx> wrote:

Robert Comer wrote:Thanks, Robert.

What does "pretty rigid in disk timings and such" mean?

BTW, I am mostly interested in the WHS for client backup and connectivity, not
for shared folders (for which I think I would prefer using shared folders on the
host). I'm planning to run the WHS with just one big (virtual) hard drive on the
eSata drive.

Will eSata perform better than USB in this situation (the drive I have can be
either).

--
David Wilkinson
Visual C++ MVP

>What does "pretty rigid in disk timings and such" mean?

If the disk balancer or cleanup are slowed down any there's a good
chance for corruption or the backup database. At least I ran into it
a lot when I tried to run WHS in a VM. (I'd only get about two weeks
out of a fresh WHS install in a VM before the corruption started to
take its toll.)
That's all I ever used it for in a VM as well.I don't know on that one, I've never used an eSata drive, so I don't
know what the reliability or speed is.

--
Bob Comer




On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:26:49 -0500, David Wilkinson
<no-reply@xxxxxx> wrote:

Robert Comer wrote:Robert:

That is rather disturbing. But I haven't seen other reports of corruption of WHS
in a virtual machine.

I was thinking of running with just a single large (500 GB) virtual hard drive,
so there would be none of this disk balancing/staging/duplication business going
on. Do you think that would make it more reliable.

Also, what about fixed size versus expanding virtual hard disk?

--
David Wilkinson
Visual C++ MVP

>Do you think that would make it more reliable.

All I can say is try it, on my hardware it didn't work, maybe on yours
it will. (Pentium D 930, dual core 3Ghz with the original version of
VT, Vista or XP host, 4G of RAM, lots of disk.)
Fixed would be best.

--
Bob Comer


On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:19:08 -0500, David Wilkinson
<no-reply@xxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 09:00:07 -0500, Robert Comer
<bobcomer-removeme-@xxxxxx> wrote:
A bit OT here, but I have been looking for WHS on the MS Downloads
(MSDN Subscriber) without finding any trace of it.
Do you know if it is a server that is part of the MSDN
subscriptions???
--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

I don't think MSDN carries it.

--
Bob Comer


On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 23:19:22 +0100, Bo Berglund <boberglund@xxxxxx>
wrote:

In message <ORlidsleJHA.3968@xxxxxx> David Wilkinson
<no-reply@xxxxxx> was claimed to have wrote:
In short, yes. eSATA performs like an internal SATA drive, the only
difference is in cabling.

USB introduces fairly significant overhead, so even if your drive can't
exceed your USB controller's theoretical bandwidth, eSATA will still be
faster then USB for the same underlying physical drive.