Vista - vpc hardware & performance

We're looking at replacing several of our old, out-of-warranty, servers with
a new server that can run virtual pc. These servers are currently
configured with XP and run a home built app that is targeted to run on XP.
We'd like to replace several of our old servers with 1 new workhorse server
that can run multiple virtual pc clients.

I was thinking the optimal solution will be to purchase a new HyperV server
with a lot of ram and run Virtual PC. I have a couple of questions about
that and appreciate any advice I can get.

- VPC 2007 runs on Windows 2003 as a host system, but VPC only runs on a
host system of Windows 7. Will I have any problems installing Windows 7 on
a server - say a HP Proliant DL 360 G6, 2-quad core's and 16 GB ram. Will
that server be on Windows 7's HAL?
- Assuming I do go forward with the HP server mentioned above, how can I
determine how many virtual pc's I can install on that box?
- Wouldn't I want to install Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 as the host OS
on this server? If I do, then I'm assuming I can't install VPC, and I
instead need to install VPC 2007, correct?
- One of the items that has been raised is whether each virtual pc will get
the same performance, or could they potentially bottleneck each other. Is
there any information available on this?

Any other help available to a relative vpc newby is appreciated.

Thanks, Andre

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On Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:14:13 -0700, "Andre" <no@xxxxxx> wrote:
VPC 2007 runs on more than just Windows 2003. VPC2007 is not
supported in production on a W2K3 server, only client OSes (Windows
Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Ultimate,
Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Windows Vista
Service Pack 1 (SP1) (Enterprise, Business, Ultimate), and Windows XP
Service Pack 3 (SP3)).

Why run a client OS on a server? VPC is not the best solution for
running VMs as a server. If you want to stick with Windows 2003 for
the host OS, you should look at Virtual Server 2005.

This really depends on what your VMs are doing and how much memory
they need and how much memory your server has. With 16GB, you could
run quite a few XP VMs, but if they are very CPU dependent, that will
be your limitation over memory.
No. Hyper-V is a virtualizaiton tool also. You dont' run VPC on top
of Hyper-V. Hyper-V allows you to run XP VMs.
It really depends on what you're doing with your VMs. Are they using
a lot of disk, CPU, RAM, network I/O?
You need to have an idea of what your VMs are doing before you can
determine a bottleneck. It's mostly common sense, if your VMs
generally use 90% of a CPU, then that's your bottleneck, you'll want
to limit the number of VMs to N-1 cores, i.e. if you have 2 quads,
you'd probably only be able to run.
--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

Thanks for the reply.

Our main reason for wanting to do this is for consolidation in our rack. We
effectively have a virtual office, and all of our servers are at a colo. As
I mentioned, we have several older servers running XP that serve as
workstations. We'd essentially like to replace them with a new server that
can run multiple vm's. Since we want XP as the OS on the vm's, are we
better off looking at one of the other vm softwares out there? If we do go
with Windows server, it will be 2008. Thanks again.

Andre