Virtualisation

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mic_y

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Hi guys,

I have a quick question...

I am soon going to be putting in an HTPC in my house, and was hoping to do the following with it. I want to run both exchange server (on Windows server 2008) as well as something media related (XP Media center/Vista home premium). What would be the best way to go about doing this? Also, the Media center OS will need some decent performance in the event that I decide to play h.264 encoded blu-ray/hd-dvd rips. The GFX card will provide acceleration, but will this work under a virtualised environment?

Is this realistically possible, and what hardware specs should I go for? The exchange server is only going to be used under light load (maybe 5 users).

Thanks in advance...
 
I would recommend you run the media server as the host os.. then the exchange server in a guest.. VM's dont really do graphics......

VMware server would probally be you best bet
 
greggpb said:
I would recommend you run the media server as the host os.. then the exchange server in a guest.. VM's dont really do graphics......

VMware server would probally be you best bet
Click to expand...

+1

I use it. Correct, VMs don't do 3D acceleration because they need to use their own driver...
 
you do know that Media Center is just XP/Vista underneath. you should be able to install Exchange on the same OS.

my post would not be complete if I didn't point out to you that you could do the same with a Linux box... MythTV is quite good. I would suggest going the Ubuntu server route.
 
mkay... so pretty much, Install Vista/XP, then create VM. Then, do all VM setups, and create domain. Join the Vista/XP install to the domain as well as any other PC's.

Just another question: how many NICs would i need to have? Does each OS need a separate one, or will both of them be able to use the one NIC?
 
Gonna have a bit of chicken and egg problem if your dc is gonna be hosted in one of the domain clients.....

Not a problem.. but you gonna have to do manuall authentication
 
Why bother with a VM at all? Surely windows is capable of running both pieces of software at the same time on the same host?
 
another thing to thing of is that Microsoft do not support Exchange running in a Virtual enviroment so if you were to need any help from them you would not get it.
 
icyrus said:
Why bother with a VM at all? Surely windows is capable of running both pieces of software at the same time on the same host?
Click to expand...

This is what I was wondering? Is there some reason why you want to do this in a virtual environment?

Why don't you just run them both normally from within XP?
 
Gary Davis said:
another thing to thing of is that Microsoft do not support Exchange running in a Virtual enviroment so if you were to need any help from them you would not get it.
Click to expand...

I run several corporate Exchange 2003 servers in VMWare ESX, no issues with any of them. So while it might not be officially supported (if that's the case - I haven't seen any references to it), it certainly works just fine.
 
The new support doc will ber out in the next few days and it will say that running Exchange virtually is not supported. but that aside Exchange works fine in Hyper-V which comes with Server2008. I have a whole cluster set up for testing and it works fine. I was just saying that MS will not give help.
 
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