Using WHS and Windows 7 on the same machine.

[latitio]

I have searched around and found out that WHS works on Vsphere, but this

is my situation and what i'm wondering. I just bought these components:

GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD3P

Intel Core i7-860

G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB model F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL

ASUS EAH4350 SILENT/DI/512MD2(LP) Radeon HD 4350

LG Black 8X BD-ROM 16X DVD-ROM - Model CH08LS10

Now i would like to run WHS on one virtual image, and Windows 7 on

another. I will be ripping my blu-rays and dvds and i plan on encoding

them to a mastroska or mp4 file. If i store the files on the WHS image,

will there be any problems streaming them to the Windows 7 image or any

other computer on the network?

Now i know the realtek cards aren't supported, is there any custom one

for the 8111d, if not so i can buy a new network card. Will i be able to

create a raid 5 on this board and have whs recognize it? Also can

multiple monitors be used in vsphere? I also wanted to install vsphere

on a thumb drive, will that affect it in anyway?

Thanks for any help.

[J1mbo · Accepted solution]

Hello, yes you can easily run WHS and Win7 on one machine, but....

I'm not sure ESXi is the hypervisor you want for this project. With ESXi, you have console access to NO virtual machines directly - all that the local screen will show is the very plain text-mode ESXi shell. There is the possibility of passing through a second video card to a VM using vmDirectPath I suppose but then there's still the keyboard and mouse. Essentially, any running VM provides network services (only), be that RDP access or whatever.

From what has been said, you could however consider running Win7 as the host OS (such that the computer is essentially just a Win7 PC), and then run WHS as a VM either in Virtual PC or vmware Workstation.

Either way you'd probably want 8GB RAM in the box. Another issue is disk contention - one of the nicest features of WHS is the Drive Extender, so you'd probably want to either assign it essentially complete hard-disks individually. The DE balancing can create a fair amount of disk IO when it runs hourly and could easily bog-down the host if it's all running from a single SATA drive.

HTH

Please award points to any useful answer.

[latitio]

I was afraid i wasn't going to be able to use multiple monitors, i could use a wyse terminal to remote into it, but then again that would not be as useful.

I thought about running WHS in workstation, but i'm afraid that if i'm encoding a video on the windows 7 machine, it will slow down the WHS when trying to access a movie from another computer.

I am also worried about disk contention too, because i had the same problem when running WMC in workstation. I plan on having at least 4 drives, 1 for the OS and at least 3 for the data. Would i be able to create a raid and add it in workstation or would it be better to add the drives to the WHS virtual machine? I really do not want to lose data, but also would rather not use drive extender since it acts more like a mirror.

Thanks for your help.

[J1mbo]

For virtualisation, the overall IOPS rate is much more important than the MB/s sequential throughput in terms of dealing with contention.

The issue is that SATA drives aren't ideal in parity-based RAID volumes because of the high latency for small writes (seek-read-rotate-write) which then leads to RAID-10 most likely, which performs much better (seek-write). Given the cost of the drives, it's probably better to buy one or two more disks for the same capacity and run RAID-10.

For RAID, with ESX you'd need a hardware RAID controller, rather than the software based (i.e. ICH*) solutions built into most motherboards, and it also needs battery-backed write-cache. Good home-use controllers are the HP E200 and Dell Perc 5i and 6i, all of which you should be able to find on eBay for reasonable money.

All of that may well lead you back to drive extender with folder duplication...., and indeed a seperate machine for WHS potentially.

Please award points to any useful answer.

[latitio]

So i guess using vmware vsphere or workstation in either of these situations is not practical? I was just trying to prevent from buying additional hardware for WHS. Would you recommend using WHS in workstation and using drive extender for the additional harddrives then?

Thanks.

[J1mbo]

The only real issue here is the requirement to play media using this box; this in itself pretty much mandates that Win7 is installed as the base OS.

More generally of course WHS and Win7 (and lots more) can be run with ESX together, indeed I do exactly this myself on a quad-core box with 8GB and a 4-disk RAID-10 volume, but there is just no easy way to get video over the network through a remote console. Even photo editing through RDP can be a bit painful at times.

It might be worth looking at whether Win7 is however the right platform to play the video, or whether a media extender (i.e. xbox 360) would suffice. If you can move the video playback from the machine, it would make it possible to have a centralised WHS installation, which you can virtualise if you like and have other servers(/services) to run. If you don't, a native WHS install with DE would probably be the way to go.

Also we got served is probbaly worth a look.

HTH

[latitio]

I currently use Windows Media center in Windows 7 for all of my playback. I use the My movies and media browser extensions to file and view all of my collection in Windows media center. Now of course everything playsback fine because it is a local harddrive, but my goal was to have the database stored in WHS and share that out so i can point to it in WIndows Media Center. Do you see a problem with playback in this instance? I would love to use my Xbox, but it doesn't support Matroska very well, it maybe because of how slow my current system is.

thanks