Alright here’s the deal in a nutshell.
I am a MCSE but only certified on NT 4.0 I don’t work in an IT position anymore but I think in the next 8-12 months there will be IT positions opening with the state I work for.
I don’t want to take physical classes for the current exams because I’m better at learning on my own with books and other guides.
Currently I have three Windows 7 PC’s and a 2003 R2 Server in my house.
I want to build a 2008 server using an Eval to get my skills up.
I was thinking of a system running Linux then running 2008 server in a VM so I could have multiple servers.
I’d like to keep the hardware outlay under $500 and I don’t want to upgrade the 2003 box.
Suggestions on what to buy/build
You can use Server08 with Hyper-V as the hardware install and have all the VMs you want under that. There’s no reason to introduce Linux unless you want to.
I run server 08 with hyper-V direct on my laptop with a gaggle of virts also running server 08 under there. Now this is a hefty laptop (Dell M6400) with 8GB of RAM, RAID HDs, etc. It cost more like $5K than $500. But it will support the host & 4 virts running with tolerable performance for single user development work.
If you don’t need as many virts running at once, naturally the RAM requirements go down. But 2GB is about the minimum to run the host OS, and 2 more for the first guest.
As to HD space, figure about 20GB per Windows instance, physical or virt.
I don’t have any more specific suggestions, but now you’ve got one data point on what can be done.
I was figuring Linux would use less ram than a Server 2008 system. I have two 500 GB USB drives not being used so that would be a start. Any suggestions for a motherboard and CPU?
IANA hardware guy, so I can’t offer much more detailed advice. We just buy 'em from Dell & use 'em until they’re obsolete. I spec rough RAM & HD & tell the hardware guy to pick something at a good price point.
Actually I goofed in my first reply. The laptop has 16GB of RAM, not 8. The processor says its an Intel Core2 Quad CPU Q9100 @ 2.26 GHz.
I also have a 6 month old Dell desktop with a Xeon E5405 processor @ 2.00 GHz and 8GB of RAM. And a faster HD. That one runs the equivalent virts a smidgen faster, at least until the RAM runs out & we start paging. Back when I got it I checked the CPU models on a benchmark site & IIRC the laptop CPU was about 45% the speed of the desktop one.
One tuning suggestion: Turn off the guest Windows’ virtual memory. i.e. set the pagefile to zero/none. And use the virt host config tools to grant them 2 or whatever GB of virt RAM which the guest will then believe is physical RAM. That way only the host system is trying to manage paging.
Another thought: My virts are running SQL Server or other RAM-expensive payloads, so they need 2 to 4 GB each. If you are mostly intending to use the virts to learn how to set up & administer them, I bet you can get by with allocating only 1GB for each. That’ll run the config tools and the various server-y services like DNS or IIS or … just fine.