Combining Vista Media Centre & a Virtual Windows Home Server

By on December 9, 2008 in Software, Windows Home Server, Windows Media Center

Virtual Machines is a technology that allows one physical computer to host multiple OS’s.  Microsoft has various flavors of VM software.  VMware is a SW company that focuses on providing VM solutions.  The company that I work for went virtual earlier this year.  I would not want to pay what they did for that version of VMware software, but both Microsoft and VMware have several free offering for the casual/home user.

In a world where “Going Green” has significant meaning, virtual machines offers a means to reduce your energy footprint.  Not that VM’s are for the average home user, but give it time.

Paul Young went through an upgrade recently where he retired his old WHS and loaded his WHS OS on his Media Center PC as a Virtual OS using VMware.

You can read about his experience here.

Are Virtual Machines worth it?  I would say perhaps yes, perhaps not.  In order for me to feel comfortable with a VM setup, I would really like to play with one to determine the “best” VM OS that would suit my purposes.  This would require a spare machine, client OS’s that I would not have to be concerned with activating (perhaps several times), and the time to devote to such an exercise.  None of which I possess…


Enjoyed this post? Share it.

If you enjoyed reading this post, then why not share it with your friends and followers?

About Jim Clark

Hello. I’m from the heartland of the U.S. Lots of corn and beans, although Iowa is a lot more than just farmland. It also has a few computer enthusiasts (no, not me!). I’ve been around PCs since I got my 1st PC XT aloooong time ago. WGS is one of the first sites I found centered around WHS. And the best. Every once in awhile, I do get away from the KB and enjoy time with and my wife and our 4 kids. And I do have a day job.
View all posts by Jim Clark →

Sign Up for WGS Daily News

If you don't want to miss out on the latest news from We Got Served, why not subscribe to our daily digest? You'll get the day's headlines and a short summary of each news item delivered straight to your inbox each morning.

, , , , , ,

  • Jason

    Im currently doing alot of virtualisation for different companies at the moment and can tell you that it is an excellent technology.

    I also totally agree with you that no home user would want to pay the cost that these companies are paying.

    Where virtual machines using the various free options are great for home users is for example to have a dedicated virtual machine that is only ever used for internet banking.
    (I even have my dad doing his internet banking this way)

    and another virtual machine that is used to test out new software your thinking about trialing, but dont want to risk damaging your main OS.

    and if you ever need to visit a web site that your a bit suspicious about do it in a VM. If you get a virus, just delete the VM.

  • Jim Clark

    iirc, the cost was in the $30,000+ range for the version my company purchased. Definitely NOT for the home user! :)

    Curious question: once set up, is it (home version) minimal maintenance? I have enough “fun” maintaining what I already have!

  • hype8912

    I use VMServer or VirtualPC/Server on about everything. As a web developer you need to learn it. Anyway I have my homeserver setup the opposite way with Vista Home Premium loaded on a virtual machine. I like that you can control the resources on the VM machine as needed.

    Although I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have a pretty good computer like a dual core and a few gigs of ram.

  • Jason

    Hi Jim

    yes your right about the cost, and to answer your question,
    “It depends” on how you set it up, and how much you fiddle with it :)

    hardware is cheap and what im seeing is a ESX host running up to 40 vm’s at any one point and the CPU sitting at about 15-20% the machine in question has 2 quad cores xeons running at 2.5 ghz total 8 cores.

    so for the home user a dual core would be fine. a quad core nicer.

    The biggest constraint is RAM get as much as you can afford. 8 gig would be minimum.

    easier yet, buy a cheap dell or hp server. They are really cheap these days.

    your best bet for stability (set and forget) is to run a hypervisor as the operating system on the bare metal.

    Vmware has esxi for free and microsoft also has released a free bare metal hypervisor.

    once installed, you do all the setup via a client on another desktop.

    by not using a full blown operating system on the bare metal, you will avoide alot of down time through patching etc and there is a smaller vulnerability window, meaning better security.

    check compatibility guides before buying any hardware.

    Where you will run into maintenance issues is where you have a full blown OS as the underlying operating system and you use that OS for your day to day stuff as well as hosting vm’s with vmware server or virtual pc.

    Hope that all makes sense, I covered alot of material in a short space. Each point could really be expanded out alot.

  • Jason

    Having said all that above. If you just want to run one or 2 virtual pc’s for testing apps and banking, and you dont have these machines running all the time. Just install vitrual pc, or vmware server on your usual desktop.

    my post above is really for if you want to run VM’s on a 24/7 basis, like if you were running windows home server as a virtual machine etc.

    sorry for any confusion.

  • Mark OD

    It all depends on the purpose of the VM. I use VM at home on a P4 1.8GHZ w/ 2GB RAM. The machine has multiple purposes none of these are CPU intensive. One Windows OS for file sharing, torrents, print server, and authentication, and on the same machine I have a VM instance of ClarkConnect. With dual NIC cards this was my perfect solution for centralized security, file sharing, and printing and I have never had a problem.

  • Pingback: Virtualizing Media Center on Windows Home Server :: Shiny Things

  • Mak

    Virtual nodes are good up to a point.

    Virtual nodes are well placed in offices as the service they provide are limited mainly software communications.

    It gets tricky in the home place when you want to start connecting to external hardware devices, one particular example (that lead me here for some reason) is Windows Media Center, you can’t really connect to a TV Tuner card, other examples may include scanning, use of surround sound.

    It all depends on what you want to do!

    Good luck!

    Makand

  • Wilkes

    Have you tried VirtualBox? It says it can do access to USB devices on the VirtualBox host machine. It is free, Open Source and runs under the terms of the GNU General Public License. I use this to run a XP VM on a Win7 Ultimate x64 laptop using a dual core processor, 4GB RAM without the VM assist feature and it runs very well. It would probably be even better if my processor had VM assist!http://www.virtualbox.org/

    Good Luck on this project!