A few people have mentioned to me about the possibility of running Windows Home Server on a virtual machine and I did try it with Virtual PC back when Home Server was in beta but while it worked I found the performance was not very good and it didn’t make a lot of sense running a server on Vista. However Ed Bott has a much better scenario and that is to run WHS on Windows Server 2008 using Hyper V. For most people I would not recommend it but I can see where it would have some potential, how about virtualizing Vista and having Media Center and Home Server on the same box (shame the tuner would not work) all working with extenders?

Interestingly, Windows Home Server recognizes that the drives are virtual and thinks each one is 400GB in size. In reality, they’re dynamic virtual disks on a physical drive that is 500GB in size. And right now, the actual physical space in use on that drive is only about 100GB or so. Eventually I’ll have to replace that drive with one that can actually hold 800GB, but I won’t come close to using that much storage space anytime soon, so I can afford to wait. Meanwhile, I have breathing room to replace the existing drive later without having to go through the hassle of re-creating the server.

Running Windows Home Server in a virtual machine