A VM Strategy for the Home Environment. :)

[sal]

When I looked into Hyper V it became apparent that it didn't have a GUI, so all the admin of it had to be done by remote management tools or Power Shell. No thanks.

The T20 only cost me a couple of hundred with the cashback deal, and has dual quad code Xeons that pack a punch. Filled it with 32Gb of desktop memory for £100 so jobs a good'un. No it's not ECC, can I tell the difference? No.

I guess you don't realise that the paid for Server 2012 R2 Standard/Essentials/Datacenter with GUI has Hyper-V build-in that can be enabled from "Roles and features", so you have both hypervisor and GUI. What you're talking about is the free Hyper-V server that indeed has no GUI.

Are you sure it's a T20 you have, amazed how you managed to cram dual CPU in single CPU Motherboard

[rl4engc]

A bit late to the party, but why on earth would you put an expensive, inferior, type 2 hypervisor - VMWare workstation on top of Server 2012R2 with built in superior type 1, free(already paid for) hypervisor - Hyper-V?

The solution to your problem of providing desktop experience for the mrs. is to just let her login to the Server 2012 host and RDP to a VM running desktop OS of choice. It's an awful setup tho, you could have bought her a laptop for the price of the VMWare workstation license.


On as side note HP Gen.8 Microserver is far better than Dell T20 - same price bracket, but it has 2x1Gbit NICs and iLO and is 1/3 of the size

When I looked into Hyper V it became apparent that it didn't have a GUI, so all the admin of it had to be done by remote management tools or Power Shell. No thanks.

The T20 only cost me a couple of hundred with the cashback deal, and has dual quad code Xeons that pack a punch. Filled it with 32Gb of desktop memory for £100 so jobs a good'un. No it's not ECC, can I tell the difference? No.

[sal]

A bit late to the party, but why on earth would you put an expensive, inferior, type 2 hypervisor - VMWare workstation on top of Server 2012R2 with built in superior type 1, free(already paid for) hypervisor - Hyper-V?

The solution to your problem of providing desktop experience for the mrs. is to just let her login to the Server 2012 host and RDP to a VM running desktop OS of choice. It's an awful setup tho, you could have bought her a laptop for the price of the VMWare workstation license.


On as side note HP Gen.8 Microserver is far better than Dell T20 - same price bracket, but it has 2x1Gbit NICs and iLO and is 1/3 of the size

[SimonMac]

Got a cheap tablet, but it's more for her professional qualification stuff so you need a desk and a keyboard.

Tablet, keyboard and VNC/RDP to a VM

[darrylmg]

Naa. It's a server, I don't want to be rebooting it cos she wants to send an email. It's on 24/7 for a 99.99% Uptime of torrent downloading and file sharing/file store.



Well the server (or rather, the monitors for it) is in the home office cos that's where the desk space and cabinets are, don't really want to clutter it up with extra leads and stuff.

How about, can I lock down an account on W12 Server so the only thing the user can do is a Remote Desktop into a VM? That could work couldn't it? Possibly do it as a startup command?

You could:
- Lock down the 2012 server so it starts up a VM on boot, or something, like you've suggested.
Or
- Lock down her desktop so that the icons all point to a specific VM and make the most of the Unity feature in VMware. This will help to make it look seamless to her.
Don't forget to remove the ability for her to shutdown the server.

[portseven]

bet her a rapberry pi and rdp to the win7 vm

[stek]

Ummm if she's got something to RDP from then why does she need an account on the server?

Personally as a hypervisor I'd be using ESXi as apart from anything else it doesn't need a GUI.

If your Mrs needs a desktop rather than just email, then just buy a cheapo Dell and have done with it. You'll regret it when your server (instead of her desktop) is cluttered up with random crap otherwise.....

Think he wants her to log onto main w12 host with a restricted account and rpd to auto started W7 guest on VMware workstation

Sounds like a right faff.

[b0redom]

Ummm if she's got something to RDP from then why does she need an account on the server?

Personally as a hypervisor I'd be using ESXi as apart from anything else it doesn't need a GUI.

If your Mrs needs a desktop rather than just email, then just buy a cheapo Dell and have done with it. You'll regret it when your server (instead of her desktop) is cluttered up with random crap otherwise.....

[rl4engc]

Dual boot?

Naa. It's a server, I don't want to be rebooting it cos she wants to send an email. It's on 24/7 for a 99.99% Uptime of torrent downloading and file sharing/file store.

Get her a £200 laptop or desktop, unless space is the issue?

Well the server (or rather, the monitors for it) is in the home office cos that's where the desk space and cabinets are, don't really want to clutter it up with extra leads and stuff.

How about, can I lock down an account on W12 Server so the only thing the user can do is a Remote Desktop into a VM? That could work couldn't it? Possibly do it as a startup command?

[d000hg]

Got a cheap tablet, but it's more for her professional qualification stuff so you need a desk and a keyboard.

Get her a £200 laptop or desktop, unless space is the issue?

[stek]

Dual boot?

[rl4engc]

Get her a cheap tablet!

Got a cheap tablet, but it's more for her professional qualification stuff so you need a desk and a keyboard.

[SimonMac]

Hi All,

So I've got my Dell T20 all set up running Windows 2012 R2 Server, and VMWare Workstation Pro to run Virtual Machines. The idea being keep the W12 Server 'clean' with minimal extra software, all that can go on the VM's which can easily be rolled back etc. Got W10 and W7 Ultimate so far, mainly for file sharing activities. Bridged so they can all talk. Host is effectively the storage server too.

All going well until Mrs.rl4 asks if she can log on to the computer, like she always has (Account on old Windows 7 box). Had issues in the past where e.g. Firefox was running on her account and I couldn't update it was in use.

So long and short is I want a separate VM for her but ideally not by logging into W12 Server to get to it. Is this possible? Just getting up to speed on VM's so ideally don't really want to go down the route of Headless servers, HyperV, Separate Domain Controllers etc. What do other folks do on here?

Get her a cheap tablet!

[rl4engc]

Hi All,

So I've got my Dell T20 all set up running Windows 2012 R2 Server, and VMWare Workstation Pro to run Virtual Machines. The idea being keep the W12 Server 'clean' with minimal extra software, all that can go on the VM's which can easily be rolled back etc. Got W10 and W7 Ultimate so far, mainly for file sharing activities. Bridged so they can all talk. Host is effectively the storage server too.

All going well until Mrs.rl4 asks if she can log on to the computer, like she always has (Account on old Windows 7 box). Had issues in the past where e.g. Firefox was running on her account and I couldn't update it was in use.

So long and short is I want a separate VM for her but ideally not by logging into W12 Server to get to it. Is this possible? Just getting up to speed on VM's so ideally don't really want to go down the route of Headless servers, HyperV, Separate Domain Controllers etc. What do other folks do on here?