Now that I have a full blown server at home, I needed a way to use it for several purposes. There where two options:
Install Everything, including the kitchen sink, on one OS and deal.
Install a Virtual Machine Server to allow me to use multiple computers.
Between those two options, I’ve done the first, not fun. The second was the only way to go. The hard part about that option was, which software to install.
There has been 1 major vendor for the VM market for several years, but several have come out recently that are making headway - mainly, Microsoft’s Virtual Server. I chose to go with Virtual Server because I get the Enterprise Edition with my MSDN subscription and VMWare’s 64bit environment, from what I’ve read, is a software hack that happens to work right. VMWare can also cost a lot more than I was willing to spend for my little po-dunk test server.
Install
Installation of the software is so simple, your typical teenager could do it. The hard part is getting it to actually fire up. The reason I say that is because I installed it on Server 2008. If you’ve never messed with Server 2008, I strongly suggest you start learning ASAP, because things are much different. Server 2003 allowed you to select various components of IIS to install in Add/Remove Programs - 2008 takes it a step further by allowing all kinds of weird options inside of IIS to be added and removed individually. On top of that, IIS 7 threw me through a loop too.
Long story short, I installed the software, went to the configuration screen (which happens to be a web page) and nothing happened. All I got was a blank page. The standard “Welcome to IIS 7″ page wasn’t displaying either. To fix this, I had to do all of the following:
Activate CGI Access (IIS)
Activate .Net (IIS)
Activate Simple Auth (IIS)
Activate Static Content (IIS)
Add the localhost name to the trusted zone (IE)
Check “Always Prompt” for username/password (IE)
After that was all done, things worked and the fun got worse. I accidently downloaded and installed the 32 bit version - oops. I had to uninstall and reinstall the software, which went very quick and things where back to normal again.
VM Setup
I ran into more problems here, and those problems may turn people off from this software. I honestly got a little upset when I found out that, even if you are running a 64 bit OS, with a 64 bit install of MSFT-VMS, you can ony run 32 bit Virtual Machines. Aparently, the 64 bit VM capability will be added in the next major release, which is slated for…awhile. This problem caused me to re-download a lot of the OS’ and software that I needed as well as rethink my plans for later. This is also the reason that I was forced to install Exchange 2003 since 2008 is only 64bit. MSSQL 2005 was installed because 2008 wasn’t officially out of Beta at the time and I needed to brush up on it before moving to 2008. I’ll be installing Exchange and MSSQL 2008 when the VM software supports the 64 bit environment.
Other than that, setup went ok. There are some issues I have with the software, however.
- CPU Utilization is a little clunky. I can only evenly split up the CPU states. If I barely use Exchange, but would like to push more resources towards IIS, I have to assign a “Weight” to the process, making things a little odd to understand.
- When remoting in, you are given an itty-bitty 640×480 (approx) box to use via webpage. This is, unless you decide to use Remote Desktop to remote into each machine. I’ve turned this on, because things just don’t size well using the internal web (ActiveX) Viewer. And yes, there is an RDP client for the Mac… Click the picture below for a full size view of the internal Remote screen.
- Only 32bit OS’ are currently supported. This means a max of 4GB of memory per machine. If I wanted to allocate more memory to my MSSQL server and just shut off Exchange, I have wasted memory since I can’t force more than 4GB on it. This also starts to cause problems on what you can and cannot install - ie: Exchange 2003 vs 2008.
- For some reason, I don’t know if it’s caused by Windows or the VM Client, but when mounting ISO’s to the machine, the ISO is cached until you switch the ISO option to the physical disk then back to a new ISO file. This causes problems when you’re attempting to install something with multiple disks.
- I haven’t put much effort into it, but due to the way the VM Environment is setup, certain flavors of Linux have problems with it. It is not setup like VMWare that emulates full on hardware.
HyperV
Some of you slick people out there may be shaking their heads wondering why I’m running Server 2008 and Virtual Server instead of HyperV. Well, first, go and read this. It’s a copy of a Blog post by the original author (that post now 404’s on the authors website). Secondly, Microsoft’s own website lists an oddly worded explanation between the VM Server Product and HyperV:
Q. What are the differences between Hyper-V and Virtual Server?
A. Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 is the current server virtualization solution from Microsoft and is based on a hosted virtualization platform. Hyper-V, a key feature of Windows Server 2008, is a hypervisor-based virtualization platform that will enable customers to not only consolidate a vast array of workloads but also enable moving toward a dynamic IT environment. Core feature set differences include support for 64 guest virtual machines, SMP support, performance improvements, and other key features in Hyper-V.
Well, there you have it - it has a few things that I want, but after reading that blog post, it needs to mature a little more than I care to even think about. At least right now, I can literally copy and paste a machine to a secondary dir and have a full-on backup. When I started this exercise, I built one machine up and copied it to other files, fired those machines up, renamed a few things and *poof*, things just worked.
In the end, I’m satisfied with the VM Product from Microsoft, but not wowed like I was when I first saw VMWare. I would love to get ahold of a 2008 copy at some point as well. Oddly, I have a feeling that MSFT will try to sway the market by changing 2008 to the point where people like myself are forced to use HyperV. Maybe one of these days, I’ll be brave enough to touch it.
Preview of the Next Blog Post: What’s Next For Alfresco?:
After a long hiatus from blogging, I’m starting to get back into the ECM scene and I’m trying by doing a blog post daily for this entire week… But, since I’ve been so down on Alfresco for so long, I figured I’d take an in-depth look at them. Again, I’m not anti-Alfresco. I truly and honestly would love to see Alfresco take a good sized chunk of the ECM market away from other companies - and remember, there isn’t just Sharepoint out there as a competitor…


