Finally moved WHS2011 to Hyper-V

[Binky]

I was debating about a hardware upgrade for a long time. I finally broke down and built a new Win8 Pro system to use Hyper-V. I was a bit concerned since I did NOT want to reinstall everything on the WHS install - it was already working perfectly. I found a random post about using XenConverter 2.5 to package the existing installation and mount it into a hyper-v VM.

It works! Perfectly, so far. I'm loving this. If backups and everything continue to work, I'll be a pretty happy guy. I'm a little shocked at how smoothly this went.

I'm loving the ability to install non-server apps on the Win8 host, but still have the server functionality on the same hardware. Yeah, I know, welcome to 2008. But, but, but, this is a home server.

tl;dr version - Existing WHS2011 16TB server installation (drivepool) moved to Hyper-v on Win8 with no apparent issues.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

Nice! how is the performance?

 

[Binky]

Performance is very good. Of course, it's hard to judge since the WHS install is coming from lesser hardware so it should be much faster now (CPU mark 1400 vs 5100!). I'm extremely impressed with how easily it fired up under Hyper-V and it runs very, very well.

Passing through the data disks was a bit scary. That's a lot of data to expose to plug and pray.