WHS2011 and Win7 on the same Machine

DarkManX

Diamond Member
Feb 1, 2000
3,796
2
76
I just purchased all new hardware to run my WHS2011 but I was thinking of making it a Hybrid WHS and HTPC. I use VM's as guests only but have never installed any of the VM host OS's.

Questions:

Is running such a setup feasible? I know from the past VM's werent great with using hardware graphics acceleration so I am concerned about 1080P playback on my TV.

Is there a free VM option?

And are they are real benefits to running the host OS vs making WHS the host OS for my HTPC?
 

ViRGE

Elite Member, Moderator Emeritus
Oct 9, 1999
31,516
167
106
I haven't done this myself, but what you want to do should work. Though I wouldn't recommend it, not so much for performance reasons but because I'm not a fan of leaving WHS boxes in places where they're easily accessible. That and you'd have to reboot WHS every time you needed to reboot Win7.

Anyhow, make Win7 the host OS (so you have direct GPU access) and then run WHS2011 as a guest, and let it have raw HDD access. This will run far better than the opposite option because of the need for GPU access.

As for free software, since Win7 doesn't support Hyper-V, your only practical option is likely going to be VirtualBox.