A VM Strategy for the Home Environment. :)

[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

[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

[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]

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