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How many images can I run at the same time with Hyper-V?

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I have spent the better part of today building out a temporary Hyper-V server. It is sort of a proof of concept of the super server that I would like to build and the same on that I asked for suggestions imageon a couple days ago. I took my second quad-core box and scavenged some drives from my Media Center (I have a post idea on shrinking Vista volumes now!) and built out the following -

Intel Core@ Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz

Intel DP35DP MoBo

8gigs RAM (Can't recall specs)

ATI Radeon 550

1 - Seagate 200g Drive  (Boot/System)

3 - Maxtor 500g 7200 RPM SATA drive in a RAID0 Stripe (VM Image Storage)

Not exactly a server class machine and it has zero redundancy but it is just a proof of concept for now.

I dropped on Windows 2008 Enterprise, joined my domain, patched up, installed Hyper-V and started building images. I am going back in time as build images. Currently I am only as far back as Windows 2003/XP. I may not even build everything out and some of it may not even be possible. The images I have installed are shown running in the pic, the rest are just place holders.

Tomorrow I am going to build a few more images out and get SCVMM up an running to help manage everything. Already it has turned out to be a very capable test environment and has me jazzed up to build the super server and virtualize almost my entire home network. In the past couple of months I have made up my mind to get rid as many of the machines I have as I can to save on electricity and cool off the basement.

As soon as I get SCVMM up an running I am going to do some testing about using P2V to bring my existing physical boxes into VM's.

 

Cheers!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 02, 2008
    Chris If you REALLY want to push the envelope, drop on Server 2008 Core or Hyper-V Server 2008.  Lower footprint = More ram for images... :) RSAT on Vista with the Hyper-V addon will let you do the rest. I've gotten about 7 Co-existing happily, the biggest issue is ram (Board maxes at 8gb) and throughput (500gb drive only transfers so fast, so bootup is a tad slow) but when running I've had at least two Exchange 2007 coexisting, Two Server 2008, Vista (64 bit version) Two Server 2003's (and a server 2008 core) all happily co-existing with minimal CPU hit. This was a on a DUO core.  With Quad... :) Well let's just say Voooooom

  • Anonymous
    October 02, 2008
    I am going to take one of the machines that I P2V and make it a Core Hyper-V server. I am loading up most of the images with minimal RAM. I feel confident that if I can get the OSes to load that I can get all of the OSes up and running at the same time even on an 8gig machine.

  • Anonymous
    October 04, 2008
    Where's Microsoft Bob?  No respect.