Should I upgrade Server 2008 to R2 for Hyper-V?

phoeneous

I have a Dell T300 that is currently only being utilised as a terminal server. It's a quad core xeon with 8GB of ram so It's actually very under utilised and I'd like to turn it into a Hyper-V box. Right now it ony has Server 2008 R1 and I'm debating if it is worth it to go to R2. I know that you can get Hyper-V for free, just wondering if there is any good reason to go to R2.

Daniel333

Is R2 requirement for Hyper-V? I think there is an older version you can use.

What is your goal exactly? Just better hardware usage? What would the other servers be?

hypnotoad

R1, as long as you have the 64 bit version installed, will run Hyper-V. I'm guessing you have 64, since you mentioned 8 gigs of RAM.

For baseline virtualization, R1 is fine. R2 introduces some advanced features like live migration.

phoeneous

Daniel333 wrote: »

Is R2 requirement for Hyper-V? I think there is an older version you can use.

What is your goal exactly? Just better hardware usage? What would the other servers be?

Just to house about 5 hosts, nothing too drastic like a dc, dbase or app box, just testing stuff and old server consolidation. Live migration sounds cool but I doubt I'd use it for our small shop. I will to p2v though, doesnt need to be live.

MrAgent

If youre running 64bit I would definitely go R2. Added functionality and peformance increases.

earweed

Regular 2k8 should be fine.

phoeneous

MrAgent wrote: »

If youre running 64bit I would definitely go R2. Added functionality and peformance increases.

It is 64-bit but it is a single processor.

I just read this document and I'm sold: http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/B/D/5BD5C253-4259-428B-A3E4-1F9C3D803074/Top_10_Reasons_to_Upgrade_to_WS08R2_RTM.docx

I'm most interested in the hardware performance enhancements and DirectAccess.

Starke

I'm hoping this is not going to be your only HyperV host and you some kind of shared storage. Running 5 server VMs on a single host is a little scary. You may want to consider adding more memory too, 8GB is nothing for five VMs and the host.

phoeneous

Starke wrote: »

I'm hoping this is not going to be your only HyperV host and you some kind of shared storage. Running 5 server VMs on a single host is a little scary. You may want to consider adding more memory too, 8GB is nothing for five VMs and the host.[/QUOTE

I'm increasing it to 16GB and 1TB of raid5 storage.

Starke

You won't be using a HyperV cluster though? RAID 5 is not going to prevent you from all types of failures. This server will now be five times more important. If one of your physical servers fails you only lose that one server, if this server fails you will have five go down. It's the worth the investment in inexpensive shared storage and another node.

phoeneous wrote: »

Starke wrote: »

I'm hoping this is not going to be your only HyperV host and you some kind of shared storage. Running 5 server VMs on a single host is a little scary. You may want to consider adding more memory too, 8GB is nothing for five VMs and the host.[/QUOTE

I'm increasing it to 16GB and 1TB of raid5 storage.

hypnotoad

Shared storage is going to be expensive no matter how you go. Dell sales stopped calling me back when they found out I only wanted 1 equalogic SAN. Not even worth their time to sell just one $30,000 SAN.

Starke

You're quite wrong. He could always go with HP VSAs or an HP P2000 for half that cost. You can even go cheaper than that but at that point you're talking single controllers which goes back to a single point of failure. P.S. HP P4000>Dell Equallogic any day of the week.

hypnotoad wrote: »

Shared storage is going to be expensive no matter how you go. Dell sales stopped calling me back when they found out I only wanted 1 equalogic SAN. Not even worth their time to sell just one $30,000 SAN.

hypnotoad

Starke wrote: »

You're quite wrong. He could always go with HP VSAs or an HP P2000 for half that cost. You can even go cheaper than that but at that point you're talking single controllers which goes back to a single point of failure. P.S. HP P4000>Dell Equallogic any day of the week.

IMO, Dell has the worst storage offerings of all the server companies. We're stuck with Dell for political reasons.

phoeneous

I'm not really concerned about failure because of several reasons, primarily because these will not be critical hosts. Their core files will be backed up to tape anyways so I can always rebuild them within a day. My company is not going to spend a boat load of money on a SAN, 2011's budget is looking like a full Cisco VoIP conversion.