Windows Server 2008R2 on a m11x R2?

Forgive the excess of R2s in the title, but as I wait for my shipping confirmation I'm musing about the viability of installing Windows Server 2008 R2 on the m11x R2. There are a couple advantages I can see to this, mainly the ability to run my machine as a Hyper-V server and have multiple VMs available to me for work purposes.

Has anyone tried installing Server 2008 R2 on their m11x yet? There are a number of guides out there for enabling all the eye candy in 2008 to make it look like 7, and the drivers should fundamentally be the same stuff... Just curious if anyone has run into any pitfalls regarding this so far.

 

I'm sure it could be done. Just use the Win 7 Drivers, I do it all the time on various test boxes.

I personally don't see the point of it though. I work with Server 2008 /R2 and virtualisation (VMware vSphere, Hyper-V and XEN server) on a daily basis, and the simple fact is that the OS isn't optimized for a laptop. Nor it is supposed to be turned off on a daily basis (having to specify a reason why you want to shutdown everytime you want to shutdown would get on my nerves). You might find that your battery life is extremely short not to mention a number of negative side-effects.

Hyper-V is good ONLY if you want to run many VM's simultaneously in a datacentre. If you do want to run several VM's simultaneously (say greater than 5 VM's), what you'll probably find is your VM's will run like a dog still because you'll hit the Disk and CPU bottlenecks of the laptop. This is of course dependent on what you are doing. If you want to run VM's, I suggest you just install VMware workstation or VMPlayer, and you'll probably find that you'll get similar performance.

Besides, even Microsoft recommend that if you're wanting to run multiple VM's, you should really install Server Core. Which is pretty pointless given you'll need another machine to connect to it still.

All in all, I don't see why it wouldn't work. I just don't see the point of it.

 

There are tweaks to turn off the shutdown notifier, I know because I run 2008R2 on my 2510p, have a look at this site for more help.

 

That would really be a waste. I'd recommend that you just run Virtual PC or VMWare.

 

Oh I can guarantee that there are tweaks to turn lots of things off, to make it much more like Windows 7. But still is there any point? The only advantage I can think that Server 2008 can provide as a laptop OS, is that it maybe a little more stable (e.g. some updates don't need you to restart, but these are few and far between). Although that stability maybe lost if you keep turning on and turning off the OS (Server 08 is designed as an Always On OS... as you'd expect with servers). Win 7 is fairly stable as an OS, and it's configured from the get go to be a laptop OS without hacking around.

Besides, if you're legal and get the lowest cost 2008 R2 OS (Standard), it costs ~US$500 depending where you get it (not VLA). A VMware workstation license is about US$100 and the laptop comes with Win7.

Of course it's someone else's money and choice to do whatever they want, but to me its a no-brainer - if you go with Server 2008 R2, you're paying more to give yourself more of a headache and very little, if any gain.

 

i use vmware workstation 7 to run all these OS for testing..