I managed to recycle some hardware after doing some P2V work recently. I cobbled bits together and built up a lab machine so I could get some testing done at work on W2008 R2 Hyper-V.
The machine spec:
- HP DL380 G5, 8GB RAM, 1 * quad core Xeon 1.86GHz
- 2 * 72GB RAID1 15K for the OS disk
- 4 * 146GB RAID5 15K for VM storage
- 2 * 36GB RAID1 15K for the library
I installed Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise RC on C. I used a full install because I want to be able to use all the GUI’s on the machine. I did not install or use HP SmartStart –the yet-to-be-released 8.30 version will be required for W2008 R2 support.
I then downloaded the RC for Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. I installed VMM 2008 R2 RC onto C:. Using that, I’ve restricted the host to 1500MB of RAM, freeing as much as possible for the parent partition (note that at least 2GB is what’s supported by MS for VMM). I set up the VMM library on the 32GB RAID1 E drive. I compressed the contents of E to make the most of the library space. The VM storage location was defined as D.
I set up folders called VHD, ISO and Template in the library after deleting the default contents. I dumped my OS ISO’s into the ISO folder. I then built W2008 R2 RC Standard and Enterprise editions VM’s with my usual customisations. I powered them down and used VMM to convert them to templates. I entered in the unattended details, e.g. * as computer name, product key, etc, for unattended VM deployment. Once that was done I was able to quickly deploy W2008 R2 RC virtual machines with little effort.
Now I can do lots of testing and scenario work with a nice little machine. Sure, I’d love to at lease double the RAM and storage allocation but we have to make do with what’s available.