Virtual Machines

fire_munki

fire_munki

fire_munki

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Joined
25 Jun 2005
Posts
1,092
Hi,
I've got my machine running Win 7 64bit and want to set up little virtual network of 2 x Server 2008.
I've been reading about all the virtual machine software but am now not sure which one to use.
Virtual PC doesn't seem to allow me to install 64bit server looking at the posts I've found.
I'm running i5 2500K with 8Gb if thats any help.
 
although Win Server 2008 doesn't entirely need it, if I recall correctly, you need a stupid amount of RAM to install it. This can then be brought back down again after the installation has completed, but it could run quite ropey. Depends on what you want to do with it.
 
As above, ensure you've got Hardware Virtualisation turned on in the BIOS.

I have found that VMware Player is probably one of the best virtualisation applications, and it doesn't have the limit it used have where you required VMware Workstation to create VMs - Player can do this now :)
 
I might or might not! I've not tried to install anything yet, I'm trying to work out which virtual machine software to use.
To Neal I'm happy to chuck another 8Gb in if needs be. Although the min spec for server is under a gig so it should be ok after the install process.
 
That's fair enough. But as the others suggested, the HV doesn't sound like it is enabled at the moment.

Unfortuantely the only software I have used for VM's is using a dedicated VMWare ESXi server, and then using vSphere on my desktop. I don't have a need for localised VM software.
 
I can recommend Oracle VirtualBox. With 8Gb I was just about able to run a pair of Server 2008R2 instances and a load balancer, as well as my dev tools. But it was a squeeze. Upgraded to 16Gb and now I've got those three plus another Server 2008R2 instance for SQL Server and more tools running and still about 4Gb available memory!

Ahem. So yeah, VirtualBox. It's good :)
 
You could enable the Hyper V role on Server 2008 - some of the training material requires this as it install multiple VM's on it whilst using one base image and can't be ported to anything else. Microsoft Virtual PC only allows 32 bit machines at the moment.



M.
 
It just depends how much you allocate to each VM. You can get away with 1024mb for a basic Server 2008R2 instance if you're not in a hurry ;)
 
Since it's just network infrastructure a gig each will do. Mind you the RAM I've already got is only 50 quid for another 8 so we'll see how it behaves. I do plan to use it to do the labs for all my microsoft certs.
 
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