Head in the Cloud

It was time to upgrade the virtual machine host at Milestone.  Since most of our critical systems are hosted, the server(s) here didn't need to be anything to extreme.  The servers in house are development and test lab related.  The goals for the upgrade were to: Upgrade the hardware Go Green Experiment with various hypervisors to see which ones can be used in SOHO environments with low investment, low TCO, high ROI, and little or no headache when it comes to install and maintenance. Hardware Selection I first took a look at Apple's Mac Mini and Mac Mini Server.  These machines are certainly an upgrade from what I have and meet my green requirement with a mier 85W max power consumption, but they only have a dual core processor.  In most cases, I would say they are perfect for the SOHO environment.  Because we would be spinning up several virtual machines, I wanted to kick it up a notch.  I was also concerned about the availability of drivers with the Mac Mini, since I'd

CentOS/Red Hat 5.5 on Hyper-V R2 seems to work quite well.  The trick is to download the Linux Integration Services from Microsoft and follow the install guide before creating the VM.  The guide provides specific installation guidelines for creating/configuring the VM and installing the OS itself. At the time of this writing, the latest version can be found here: Linux Integration Services v2.1 for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V R2 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=eee39325-898b-4522-9b4c-f4b5b9b64551&displaylang=en ...but please be sure you download the latest version at the time of your reading this. Creating The Virtual Machine When creating the virtual machine, use the "Legacy Network Adapter" .  To reduce any issues, I recommend making this the only network adapter configured.  CentOS, actually, any non-windows server OS or Windows versions prior to 2003, will not see the virtual "Network Adapter" until integration services are