My first Hyper-v & server 2008

[Zirax]

Right I now have an action pack subscription with lots of licences. I managed to grab one of the HP Microservers (with 8gb) and I am starting playing with server 2008 Enterprise.

I am used to vCenter but since hyper-v is part of the pack I'll be using that. I am mainly after if there are any major no-no's I should know about before really playing :)

In the longer term I'll put a DC, maybe exchange as VMs as part of the MCSE accreditation.

-----------------------
Without getting too bogged down I am looking at using MSE for the server rather than individual VM virus protection. Mainly for the price reason as not many seem to do free server AV. The VMs will be using internal network so they will never be net facing. Any suggestions better than MSE for the server?

[Mark]

Compared to VMWare, the performance of MS Virtual PC was pretty poor, and Hyper-v seems to be based on the same technology, with the same problems. As a result, as host load increases, vSphere rapidly dumps all over it.

If you need it for the MSE, then of course you should use Hyper-v, but if not, then unless you've outgrown the free vSphere, I'd stick with it.

Work have been using Hyper-V for a few years. Seemed fine at the time, until we found software builds were taking hours longer than they should. So we tried vSphere, and promptly spent £100k setting up a new vSphere farm.