Which VM?

2012 will be a nightmare, and I can see much outrage and not a lot of uptake on the product, purely because from a sys admin view point - all this metro malarkey is counter productive, especially on a server (yes, I know I can use Core.)

Roll on SP1 or 2012 R2 with the ability to disable metro.

But either way, you have SBS 2011, just install the Hyper-V role and install XP on there.. Job done.

(And Hyper-V is a good product which is making some big advances, yes, it won't come up against VMWare any time soon - but it's a contender for many pure windows shops.)
 
depending on how you are planning to backup the SBS install, virtual may not be the way to go. You could run the SBS on the physical server and then use something to virtualise the XP instance.

You can still get vmware server for free I believe which should run on the SBS 2011 host machine
 
There's a lot of virtual-elitism in this thread :p... hypervisor wars are a thing of the past. All of the main type-1 hypervisors are enterprise class. Virtualisation isn't even a skill any more - any man and his dog can configure a basic HA VM solution... it's all about the package - datacentre management, monitoring and self-service.. and IMO Hyper-V + System Center wins hands down.

Nice to see some of the other players trying to catch up with all the recent acquisitions though :)

For the OP, any of the free editions of the relevant hypervisor will suit a simple job of hosting two VMs.
 
NiCkNaMe said:
There's a lot of virtual-elitism in this thread :p... hypervisor wars are a thing of the past. All of the main type-1 hypervisors are enterprise class. Virtualisation isn't even a skill any more - any man and his dog can configure a basic HA VM solution... it's all about the package - datacentre management, monitoring and self-service.. and IMO Hyper-V + System Center wins hands down.

Nice to see some of the other players trying to catch up with all the recent acquisitions though :)

For the OP, any of the free editions of the relevant hypervisor will suit a simple job of hosting two VMs.
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No elitism at all - Hyper-V in its current form absolutely sucks donkey balls compared to other offerings.

I've been using hyper-v with the server 8 beta and it is a MASSIVE improvement, but that's not here yet. I'd go as far to say as the next version of hyper-v beats vmware in quite a few areas.

At this current time though, if you want a pain free enterprise hypervisor, vmware is a million miles ahead of anything else. You can set it up in no time at all, and managing it is absolutely pain-free. The issues that do crop up are so well documented that it's easy to put right should something go wrong.
 
Hellsmk2 said:
No elitism at all - Hyper-V in its current form absolutely sucks donkey balls compared to other offerings.

I've been using hyper-v with the server 8 beta and it is a MASSIVE improvement, but that's not here yet. I'd go as far to say as the next version of hyper-v beats vmware in quite a few areas.

At this current time though, if you want a pain free enterprise hypervisor, vmware is a million miles ahead of anything else. You can set it up in no time at all, and managing it is absolutely pain-free. The issues that do crop up are so well documented that it's easy to put right should something go wrong.
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but why does Hyper-V suck donkey balls? So far all I've seen in this thread is that it's Linux support is patchy which is neither here nor there for most people.

I am genuinely interested as to whats so bad about it and what these massive improvements are in server 8's version
 
Just a question, why don't you skip hypervisors all together and install XP in software Virtualisation on the SBS server? A couple of command lines and you can get it to start in headless mode on boot if you want that.
 
Is SC-VMM better than Virtual Center though?

My main complaint with Hyper-V was that you had to have other systems to do what Virtual Center does. Microsoft were on about writing scripts for SCOM that would automatically move VM's / etc. where as, out of the box, Virtual Center does this.

I've yet to play with VMM only the Hyper-V role and, as it stands, I wouldn't go for it as it's not nice out of the box (permissions, etc.) coupled with VMM it's probably a lot better so I'll try and play with this later.


M.
 
two00lbwaster said:
Just a question, why don't you skip hypervisors all together and install XP in software Virtualisation on the SBS server? A couple of command lines and you can get it to start in headless mode on boot if you want that.
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TRNC said:
Hyper V doesnt work on SBS 2011 except with the premium add-on which we dont have and cant install on our version :(
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Because as I said earlier in this thread - you cant as it doesnt work.
 
m4cc45 said:
My main complaint with Hyper-V was that you had to have other systems to do what Virtual Center does. Microsoft were on about writing scripts for SCOM that would automatically move VM's / etc. where as, out of the box, Virtual Center does this.
Click to expand...

If you mean automatically move VMs which are unresponsive then yes you would configure a monitor and recovery steps in SCOM

If you mean just move to another host it's just a simple wizard within VMM
 
TRNC said:
The same as most of the other 4.5 million small businesses in the UK.....fix it and get back to work!
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Ok. Sounds like the availability of the files, emails and whatever the old software is, are not critical to the running of the business then.

If you had two machines you could still run each instance on it's own machine under a vm and migrate the vm to the other physical machine if you had a hardware failure. It would mean significantly reduced downtime if the machine was business critical... Minutes rather than days.
 
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The files & software are absolutely 100% critical, but we are a small business.

We dont have an IT department, we dont have multiple servers (well, 2 currently but we want to reduce that to 1 as one is rather old!)

Even with a complete failure of the hardware we could be back up and running in a few hours tops and have everything back up to date within a day. That may not be acceptable in businesses with It departments, multi-redundant servers, SANS with live backups and failovers but for most small businesses its more than acceptable.

We take regular whole system backups which live both on and off site in a fireproof safes and use SpiderOAK to (almost) realtime replicate the database our system runs on.
 
I'm not a tax expert but isn't a computer a capital purchase and therefore can be offset entirely against profits if the company hadn't already used up is capital allowance. So effectively the business may be able to buy the second server for free (agree that cashflow could be an issue of course).

Anyway... sorry didn't mean to take things off topic. I appreciate the business has decided it's continuation of business strategy and risk profile.
 
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