YES - I'm doing it... a 32gb SSD hard drive.. going to see if the SSD can perform as a webserver like people say it does. First time I'm going to be using 2008 though. I've never even installed it. Being an admin now I hate upgrading OS's of users or servers. Scares me! We're still XPsp3, and 2k3r2

Matt whats your 2k8 exp?

So far so good. We got it primarily to run all of our VMs on it however it is a mission critical production server as we're hosting our clients on it now. Managing it has been relatively easy and the box itself has been super stable. I have about 20 VMs running on it flawlessly. The only issue, and we knew this would be a problem going into it, is that we also run the SQL server off the same box. When the ram gets ate up, the disks thrash but performance was perfect until I stole the last 3gbs of available ram for the last 6 VMs I put up.

The only complaint I have for it right now is that Hyper-V doesn't handle individual VM virtual network connections like Virtual Server used to. When you setup a virtual network in 2k8 it actually changes the TCP/IP settings for the actual box. I didn't realize this so I changed the VMs to a different subnet on their virtual connections and it booted me off the server completely. Took a little while to figure out wtf was going on. But yeah, I don't have much experience with 2k8 outside of what I need for ADS and the VM management stuff. The one other quark I found is that they renamed tsadmin to tsadmin.msc....which is somewhat annoying.

I guess i might be out of the loop - is w2k8 w/HyperV a seperate VM platform? Or is it an application like Virtual Server that runs on w2k8?

I have a 2005r2 Virtual Server that I have ... 10 VMs running on? with about 12 gb of ram and 2 quad core 2.33 CPUs. I can't give them enough work to even make the server break a sweat. The disks are 4 SAS 10k rpm drives in a raid 5 and then 3 SAS 10k rpm drives in a seperate raid 5 - I did that to cut down on the thrashing. And yeah running a production SQL server on top that of seems highly risky? I'm hoping you run 64bit and have about... 40GB of ram? (not joking...)

I just implemented a SQL2008 server a month ago and migrated all our data and applications that use it from SQL2000. Man alive its about 10 times more efficient now. Web requests went from an avg of 7 seconds down to under 1 sec. Right now after all the full text indexing its avg is 780ms. Wooo!

As far as my next VM OS of choice I am experimenting with ESXi - its a free edition of the ESX platform from VMware. Ummm - wow and outstanding is all I can say. It's a command line OS - and you use an application from a PC to do all the gui work. It's amazing. I love it - I'm getting ready to use VMconvert to comvert all my 2005Virtual servers over to VMware images and add them to the ESXi server.

This weekend's task involves moving Exchange 2003 from a stand alone server like dual 1ghz P3 - and scsi 160 disks to a Blade server that is a single quad core. Should be interesting!!!

It took about 20 minutes for me to install w2k8 on my SSD laptop - wow!

Nice! Yeah as of right now, nearly all of the database intensive work is done overnight when our software runs on all of the VMs so if the server takes a huge shit it is during time when no one (not even our clients) are on the machines. We've been able to manage the load throughout the day until late last week when I started noticing the dips in performance. We ordered more ram which should get us up to either 24 or 32mbs of ram, not quite sure which option they went for. And yeah the server itself wouldn't break a sweat with that many VMs if it weren't for the freaking thrashing. The server ran like a dream with like 12-14 VMs and SQL Server running at the same time on 16gb of ram.

As for Hyper-V itself, it is really just Virtual Server on steroids that runs on top of ws2k8.