Your Windows Server 2008 Standard license should give you one physical and one virtual license.
Cheers Ken From: Carl Houseman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, 16 September 2008 8:37 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Standalone Hyper-V vs. 2008 Hyper-V In this particular (small) environment, a copy of 2008 Enterprise is not available. Only one copy of Windows 2008 Standard is available. My goal is to pick up and re-host any/all virtual servers, including the single 2008 server, to spare hardware within record time. So I don't want to spend my only 2008 server license on a not-100%-virtual Hyper-V host. From this perspective, I would say that standalone Hyper-V makes more sense. Counterpoint? Don't spend what I haven't got or promote features I don't need. Carl From: Ken Schaefer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008 6:20 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Standalone Hyper-V vs. 2008 Hyper-V Your "parent partition" (the first copy of Win2k8 you installed) *is* running on the hypervisor. I will send you some slides offlist that explain what is happening from an architectural perspective. The hypervisor now arbitrates all access to CPU (for example), however access to physical resources (e.g. disk, network) are handled by drivers in the parent partition. Guest machines use VMBus to send data to the parent partition (e.g. via shared memory space or CPU cache) which then sends it to physical resources. The problem with the "stand alone" Hyper-V is no clustering feature support. That means you don't get any HA features. As you surmise, you probably can't use the host for very much except being a host. But that's probably what you want to do anyway (gives you more resources for the guests), and if you buy an Enterprise license you get 1 physical license, and 4 guest licenses, so you aren't "wasting" anything per se - you can't convert the physical licence into an extra virtual one to run an additional workload. Cheers Ken From: Carl Houseman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, 16 September 2008 3:20 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Standalone Hyper-V vs. 2008 Hyper-V I was asking about standalone Hyper-V some time ago and looks like it's almost here. http://windowsitpro.com/mobile/pda/Article.cfm?ArticleID=100238&DepartmentID=723 Meanwhile, I installed Server 2008 for testing and installed the Hyper-V features and much to my newbie surprise, my 2008 server was not converted to a virtual instance of itself. I understand the reason for that now. The question boils down to, wouldn't I want all instances of servers on a hardware platform to be running on the "bare metal" hypervisor if possible? One of the goals of virtualizing is easy portability to run on alternate/standby hardware, and the 2008 Hyper-V host server isn't portable. That means not using the host server for anything but a host server, and that's a waste of a license. Am I missing anything? Why would I NOT prefer to use standalone Hyper-V for all virtualized servers including 2008? Carl ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
