new server: WHS emulating software?

[Konig]

I built a new server and am not all that happy with software or hardware support for WHS2011. I know that a lot of you used WHS before and went back to Win7. I'm not an IT pro so WHS really appealed to me for the simplicity. Kinda a bummer. What software are you using that offers the same features as WHS?

I figure I'll use Acronis for backup. I'll continue to use sageTV for media. What about remote login/administration? There's logmein and windows live mesh.

[Jesse]

Hi,

I had no end of troubles when I migrated from WHS V1 to WHS 2011. Lock-ups, BSODS, you name it.

I reformatted and installed Win7 32bit. Way better. I had a few issues at first, but got most of them sorted by rolling back to an older driver for my HD PVR (1.0.5.3). The latest Colossus driver appears to have put the last of my problems to rest. We'll see.

I ended up setting up a second server from (mostly) spare parts to run WHS 2011. More weirdness ensued. I would attempt to log in and get a blank blue desktop. Sometimes the desktop would appear after 30 - 60 minutes and sometimes it would never appear. I ended up re-installing and installed no drivers (I just went with whatever windows installed with the O/S) and disabled windows updates. It has been running flawlessly for about a month now. I have restored 2 machines with WHS and that has worked great as well. Soon I will start slowly updating windows and testing, but my hunch is that it is a driver issue.

In short, I would go with Win7 for sage and set up WHS on a second machine. Just be careful with drivers and perhaps windows updates.

Jesse

[Bagal]

I use Win7 64bit as my main server, I then run WHS2011 in a virtual machine just for PC backups. I used to have a separate server for WHSv1 but it just seemed pointless running a second machine just for the backup functionality.

[wrems]

You could look into unraid.

[Konig]

I installed windows 7 on the server tonight and it's running great.

I bought WHS2011 from newegg. Can I get an RMA if I never activated it when it was installed? I only had it running for about 3 days. Or is it not returnable once opened?

[gtd885a]

Originally Posted by Bagal

I use Win7 64bit as my main server, I then run WHS2011 in a virtual machine just for PC backups. I used to have a separate server for WHSv1 but it just seemed pointless running a second machine just for the backup functionality.

What software do you use for virtualization? Have any tips/guides for setting it up? My server is W7 64, and I was thinking of setting up another box for WHS 2011, but if I could do it in a VM on my existing server that would be better. I just haven't found a lot of info out there on doing this.

[Fuzzy]

VMWare Player or VirtualBox should both work well enough for this, and both are free. You don't really need any specific hardware support to run WHS for backups, so the default setups in the virtualization software would be sufficient. All the WHS needs is network access, which will be provided by default (using NAT based routing from the host to the virtual os).

[Bagal]

I use VirtualBox to run it on Win7 64bit, but as Fuzzy said VMWare would work equally well. You don't need to do anything special to set it up, but you do need to allocate at least 2GB of ram as that's the minimum spec for WHS2011 and make sure you create a virtual hard disk big enough for what you want to store on it.

[gtd885a]

Thx, guys. I guess next I need to figure out the virtual disk setup. Just realized the board on my Sage server doesn't support Raid 5, so I guess I will have to do JBOD or just have multiple disks if I go this route. I was going to use VMware, but I read that it is limited to a virtual disk size of 2TB, so maybe VirtualBox is the way to go.

Anyway, sorry to hijack the thread.

[speck55]

Originally Posted by gtd885a

Thx, guys. I guess next I need to figure out the virtual disk setup. Just realized the board on my Sage server doesn't support Raid 5, so I guess I will have to do JBOD or just have multiple disks if I go this route. I was going to use VMware, but I read that it is limited to a virtual disk size of 2TB, so maybe VirtualBox is the way to go.

Anyway, sorry to hijack the thread.

Check out VMWare Server - free, but not in active development anymore - sadly. But it still works on Win 7, and runs in the background as a service so you wouldn't have to manually start vmware player every time or have it in your startup folder.