I have a Windows Home Server (HP MediaSmart EX470) that I use for data backup and file storage. I know there have been a lot of complaints about WHS, but I have been pleased with the performance. Mostly I am pleased with the hardware that my WHS runs on. The HP MediaSmart is quiet, moderately fast and energy efficient. I have upgraded the disks, memory and cpu, athough the cpu upgrade was probably unnecessary. The additional RAM has allowed me to run VMware Server on the box. I had previously run a Small Business Server and Ubuntu server VM on a loud inefficient old pc, but now I have them both running on the WHS and performance is quite good. I was running VMware Server 1, but decided to upgrade to VMware Server 2 because it has better compatibility with my ESX VMs (I use ESX at work) and is easier to manage remotely with the Virtual Infrastructure client.
The installation of VMware Server 2 on WHS is pretty straight forward except I received an Error 1718. Basically this error occurs because the msi for the VMware installation is so large. Microsoft has a hotfix that fixes this issue. After I installed the hotfix, I was able to install VMware Server without any difficulty.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
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I have an identical setup, but was wondering if you are running your VM on an eSATA drive or a drive in the storage pool?
I am running the VMs directly from the storage pool. I have heard that this can cause problems, but it has worked fine for me.
I installed VMWare Server 2 on my WHS box and tried running my XP guest VM on it. It boots up fine and seems to work BUT whenever I try to access files on a share hosted by the WHS, the system seems to hang for minutes at a time. I can access shared files from other machines just fine. And other machines can access files shared on the WHS just fine also. But if the guest VM on the WHS tries to access WHS shares, it hangs. Have you experienced this at all?
I have not noticed issues with accessing the WHS shares, but realistically I did not use them much. I run two VMs on my WHS. The first VM is a Ubuntu server that runs Gallery 2 to serve my photos to the web. The Gallery 2 server stores all of it's data in it's virtual disks, so I rarely connect to SMB shares on the WHS, but they do work when I have used them. My other VM is Microsoft Small Business Server 2003. I have used this VM to connect to some of the WHS shares, but only when I need to install softare that is located on the WHS, which is a rare occurence. However, I did install the WHS client on this SBS VM, so that it gets backed up every night and the backup has worked very well.
Side note: In my experience HP MediaSmart EX470 with upgraded RAM and processor does not have the horsepower to run SBS 2008 as a VM.
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