Essentials and VMs

[jabajools]

Hi all,

 

     I'm pretty new to the whole home server arena. I heard about hp proliant microservers only a few days ago and since then have bought a n54l, flashed the Bios, upgraded the RAM to 8Gig, and connected my windows 8.1 clients to the domain. I did all this as I use a HTPC a lot and managing the drive space and everything else was becoming a pain this way its all central and I learned a few things along the way (for which I owe this site and these forums a big thank you). My problem now is that I want to run VMs in my server 2012 essentials. I would like one for torrents one for newsgroups and so on. I know that essentials doesn't come with hyper-v and was hoping you guys could suggest how I could achieve what I'm aiming for?

 

     Would it be acceptable to run virtualbox inside the server host?

 

Cheers

 

Jay

[jmwills]

You have 2012 or 2012 R2 Essentials?  You could run ESXi and accomplish everything if you only have 2012Essentials.

[jabajools]

Thanks for the quick reply,

 

I have 2012 essentials not r2. But I know nothing of ESXI or what impact it would have on server performance and any difficulties migrating my bare metal essentials server over.

 

Cheers Jay.

[jmwills]

You could convert the physical Essentials box to an ESXi file and run it from there.

[jabajools]

Would that approach Impact on the performance of the server? And how much of a pain would it be to migrate the server?

[ikon]

Of course there is always some  effect on performance from using VMs. However, the size of the effect depends entirely on what those VMs are doing. What I usually suggest people do is simply try a VM or 2; test drive them, see if the effect is acceptable to you.