The after-work project I’m working on right now requires as many VM’s as I can throw at it. I’ve got my previously mentioned Latitude E6500 laptop running W2008 R2 Hyper-V. It’s also my domain controller and my VMM 2008 R2 server/library. Not best practice but it’s fine for a domestic lab.
I need even more VM’s than I can run on there. So I’ve got a HP ML370 G5 that was spare from work. It’s got as much memory as I could scrape together and I put Windows Server 2008 R2 on it. One problem: I do not have a wired house. And I do not want to work beside the noisy server. I’ll be using Office on my laptop for documentation and I can sit with that in my sitting room. The server will stay upstairs in my office. Just how will the communicate?
That’s easy. I have an old Belkin 11G wifi NIC which I put into the ML370. Windows detected it as a Broadcom. That aint right but it works! I’m going to set the server up as a member of my laptop’s domain. That will allow me to put a VMM agent on there for remote management.
My VM templates are small enough (dynamic VHD’s) but I probably might not want to copy them over wifi. I might just configure the wired NIC’s with another subnet range and connect the machines with a hub/switch when I need to deploy stuff. Or maybe I’ll copy the templates over to the server using a USB disk and set up a library share on the server for a faster local copy. That might just work!