Running Virtual Machines on Windows Homeserver

An article by Administrator No Kommentare

Did you know that you can run virtual machines on your homeserver? Virtual Server which is freely availlable as download from the Microsoft website gives you just that. If you wonder why anybody would like to do this, here some ideas:

1. Testing,
2. Running alternative operating systems in your home network such as a 24/7 availlable Win7 client :-),
3. providing apps that won’t work on WHS directly (that’s my reason)

Anyhow: I use this approach right now to run Live Mesh on my homeserver. That said: It’s currently more in a test phase and I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it as running two OS on one box really eats a lot of performance. On the other hand: I just took the opportunity to order a new CPU (dual core :-) for my scaleo which should boost the performance to a whole new level. The replacement CPU will be subject to another blogpost :-)

To run Virtual Server on your WHS you should better have 2GB+ memory. Actually the more memory the better… Also multicore processors help. Most prepackaged homeservers are a little underpowered for this sort of scenario. It works though :-)

1. Download Virtual Server to your Homeserver
2. run the setup on your WHS box, leave the default settings.
3. Your Virtual Server gets controlled via a webpage that should be availlable now on http://yourservername:1024 In order to access this from outside your server you’ll need to change the security settings of the webnode in your IIS settings. Click start>Run and type in c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\iis.msc
4. Open the Web Sites Node, Right click on the Virtual Server Node and switch to the security settings and enable “basic authentication” in order to open the virtual server control page.
5. By accessing Virtual Server from a computer other than the homeserver directly you’re still receiving errors because security settings prevent you from accessing the server objects. Here is the step-by-step tutorial to get rid of this problem: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/891609/en-us 
6. Next navigate to the virtual server page and select server settings. Make sure that you’ll add a user in the user permissions tab and also enable VMRC (the remote control mechanism for virtual server).
7. You’re all set now. You can create virtual machines, mound ISOs as CD drives to them, copy VHD (virtual harddrives) etc. etc.

Just a few more hints:

With Virtual Server 2005 R2 comes a handy utility that enables you to mount VHD files to the local system. It is called vhdmount.exe and can be found in the virtual server install directory. VHD files can be created locally on one of your other computers and copied over after that. To do this, simply install locally Virtual PC 2005 and start configuring…

If you like to create an image out of your locally running system, have a look at Disk2VHD. It can do this on a live system for you… http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx