I have now been using my new server for a couple of weeks and I have some notes and experiences about it. Sorry - this is a long post. This is still a bad habit of mine. This somehow turned out writing about Hyper-V and benefits/pains with "Server 2008 R2 and WHS combo server". You can consider this as a "final report".
(Please forgive my grammar and typos. This took hours to write.
)
I can’t praise enough about Hyper-V and my new shiny server. Server 2008 R2 is really good piece of software and WHS is quite happy inside Hyper-V virtual machine. So, it’s a great combination, but a couple of randomish notes – some good, some bad.
Getting Hyper-VTechnet Subscription is your friend if you want "full" Server 2008 R2 Standard. You’ll get a lot of other stuff too – including 5 WHS licenses.
If you don’t want Technet Subscription, you can get Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 for free. Free version is based on Server Core and it is a little bit more difficult to set up. No fancy GUI, but it’s doable. Microsoft actually recommends that you use "Core" version when running Hyper-V, but in home environment workloads are usually not that high that it matters.
Get Server 2008 R2 Standard if you can. Fancy GUI is sometimes quite helpful. Get free Hyper-V Server R2 if you are not afraid of command line and you don’t need (want) advanced server capabilities (mainly AD-DS) or desktop experience.
By the way, Server 2008 R2 can be "converted" to act just like Windows 7 with Aero Peek and all bells and whistles. More information:
http://www.win2008r2workstation.com/ Getting drivers for WHS inside Hyper-VYou don’t have to worry about getting "Server 2003" drivers, since Hyper-V Integration Services includes all necessary drivers. HDD and network drivers are synthetic, so their performance is native.
You can probably run all other "advanced" stuff with Server 2008 R2 (host side) and use Windows 7 64 bit drivers if needed. This is what I do. I have 3 digital TV (DVB-T) tuners set up in the host side. I consider TV-tuners "advanced".
Sounds good? Well, there is a catch. Hyper-V SCSI drivers won’t be available until you boot your WHS. This isn’t a problem if you are making fresh/new install of WHS. But it is a problem, if you have to make WHS
restore.
You can’t insert Hyper-V SCSI drivers as "F6" drivers (loaded with WHS installer during install time). So server recovery isn’t possible, because your virtual SCSI drives aren’t visible to WHS installer. There may be a hack somewhere, but it’s not officially documented. More about why you have to use virtual SCSI drives later.
If you have to reinstall your WHS OS, you have to make a fresh install and insert your SCSI storage disks after installing WHS OS and Hyper-V integration services. This probably means a lot of copying: "Copy content out of disk, insert disk to WHS, let WHS format it and copy content back to it."
If you are using only IDE disks (3 HDD drives or less) this isn’t a problem. IDE drives are available during install/boot time. But this is unlikely scenario, since I’m writing this to "DIY builds and massive storage" forum.
Intel i3 540 CPU is quite capable little beastIt runs Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V (with WHS VM), AD-DS, torrent downloads, digital TV recordings and other stuff fluently. Don’t let that cheap price fool you!
Below is a screenshot from Resource monitor when uTorrent was downloading, DVB Viewer was recording 3 programs from different channels, WHS was streaming full-HD mkv (via NFS) from WHS and all "other" services were on.
Attachment:
nx-resmon.jpg [ 140.41 KiB | Viewed 16133 times ]
Processor load averages 13-16% and about 9-12 % of it was used by Resource monitor itself. Not bad at all.
Get at least 4-6 GB of memory.I have 8 GB. Memory is cheap and it will help you running "two or more computers in one machine".
Windows 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 will give to Hyper-V a great bonus: Dynamic memory allocation. You can set your VM memory allocation dynamically, for example 1024 – 2048 megabytes / 20 % overhead. When your VM starts, it gets 1024 megabytes of memory, but if it needs more memory, it will get it up to 2048 megabytes. All dynamically without need to reboot your VM. 20% overhead means that Hyper-V will add 20% more memory to what VM is currently demanding.
More info and supported guest operating systems for Dynamic Memory:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... 7651(WS.10).aspx
Get at least two network cards and dedicate one for WHS.It really helps.
Don’t try to save on this. My (current) two NICs are integrated "Realteks" but they have dropped twice out of network. Disable/enable adapter trick brought them back online again, but this isn’t acceptable for me, so I will get two Intel NICs in the future.
Hyper-V and storage drivesYou have to use at least one IDE drive for your VM. It can be either virtual or passthrough disk. WHS will not boot from virtual SCSI drives. It won’t even see them before "OS has been enlightened enough", which it is not during installation or boot-up.
More info about virtual SCSI drives:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/craigf/archi ... 08-r2.aspx (interesting stuff can be found under heading "Synthetic vs Emulated")
You can have only 4 IDE drives (3 HDD / 1 DVD) with your VM and after that you have to install SCSI controller to it. No biggie, only a couple of mouse clicks and SCSI controller is installed and you can attach virtual or physical HDDs to it. There is a catch though, so please read what I wrote under heading "Getting drivers for WHS inside Hyper-V" carefully.
My choice was to use one small 80 GB virtual HDD as a primary IDE disk = system drive for WHS and my 6 data drives are configured as virtual SCSI passthrough disks.
There is no (detectable) performance penalty with passthrough disks and there is only small penalty (according to Microsoft) when using fixed size virtual HDDs. This opens up some possibilities. Advanced format drives? No problem. Don’t use them as passthrough drives, but create a fixed size (max 2 TB) virtual HDD inside it and assign that to WHS.
Note: idea about creating two 1.5 TB virtual HDDs inside of 3 TB drive isn’t a good one. Performance will be crappy if WHS reads/writes both of them at the same time and you will lose both of them if that drive physically fails. Duplication won’t help you when two drives fails.
You can monitor SMART information and disk temperatures from the host side even those passthrough disks won’t show up in Explorer and are offline disks in Disk Management. You don’t need any SMART add-ins in your WHS. They probably don’t even work properly. I haven’t tried that though...
Popular Disk Management add-in (from Tentacle Software) doesn’t show temperature information. No biggie, since I monitor all my HDDs from the host side.
Backing up virtual machines can be a painVirtual Machine snapshots won’t work if VM is using passthrough disks.
You can use "Windows Server Backup" for backing up your whole system and VMs (excluding passthrough disks) but it fails sometimes if VM (WHS) is doing high disk IO in virtual HDD (VSS timeout). Demigrator anyone?
Even when it does make proper backup, it will make sometimes time complete backup of your VM and attached virtual HDD – not just "changed blocks". This means longer backup time, but you don’t have to shut down your (Windows based) VMs when making backups.
I have no idea if restoring WHS VM works. In theory it should work, but your "data disks" and System disk will be in a different state. I don’t know if it matters, but I’m not willing to try.
I decided that I will not backup my WHS VM (anymore). If the disk where my WHS VM is stored fails, I will not lose any data, since passthough (data) disks are probably fine. This means fresh install of WHS, but I’m knocking on the wood that this won’t happen, since I’m not doing anything special, running other than one add-in (Disk Management) or running "unsupported" services/programs that could mess up my WHS.
I only backup my W2008R2 system drive and it takes about 2 – 4 minutes (after first backup).
Getting disks "out of WHS" for diagnostic purposesShutdown WHS virtual machine, go to Disk Management and put the disk back online. Done.
Now that disk is visible with host operating system and you can do whatever you want with it. No need to open server case and fiddle with cables.
Go to disk management and put that disk back offline. Start your WHS VM. Now that disk is back in WHS storage pool.
Cool.
Getting WHS out of your current server to another server..is simple operation too - in theory at least. This is what you do if your server hardware fails or you get new server for some other odd reason.
Shutdown your WHS VM. Export it. Move exported files to another server. Move all passthrough disks too. Import your exported WHS VM it and verify that your data disks are set properly offline and attached to WHS VM. You probably have to add them again in Hyper-V manager since your data disks LUNs (Logical Unit Numbers) will change. Restart your WHS VM.
Done. No need to reinstall anything, no need to update drivers if your host version (and SP level) is the same or newer. Or maybe you have to update Hyper-V Integration Services but that is really simple task.