Now addressing how well Hyper-V handles Linux. Ubuntu 7.1 desktop installed with no problems at all, although still working on networking. My Linux skills are pitiful, so I draw no conclusions yet about whether the networking issues are related to Hyper-V or user error. Perhaps I’ll have to install the Unix services roll on the base server. Am also installing a more recent version, 8.1, and will probably throw a Linux server up there, too. From a CPU and disk perspective, no problem — this machine still has a gear or two on the upside.

I am running out of memory, however, now that I have 6 VMs on this 8GB machine. The culprit: SQL Server on the base machine. Why did I install that? I’ve been trying to get System Center Essentials (SCE) on to the base machine and that requires SQL Server. This is a very tangled web Microsoft has woven: you need SQL Server and Windows Server Update Services to run SCE. SQL Server, no big deal; WSUS, something of a project, as it involves Group Policy. So far I haven’t gotten SCE to install and may abandon the whole project.

It does point out an interesting conundrum: Hyper-V manager manages memory for VMs. Is it more efficient than the base OS is? In other words, if SQL Server were running in a VM, would it be using as much memory? Sounds like my next experiment.