ServeTheHome.com

If one browses this site they will quickly see that I am a fan of Hyper-V virtualization and also Windows Home Server. On April 26, 2010, Microsoft released the public preview of the long awaited Windows Home Server V2 codenamed VAIL. Of course, I did have a test system lying around, but the WHS V2 code base is supposed to be Windows Server 2008 R2 which is why it requires a 64-bit CPU. Now, I could have installed the VAIL preview onto a physical machine, but there are probably editors at 30 sites doing that right now. So how about something interesting, and more appropriate for software labeled beta and preview, a Hyper-V installation!

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As many have read, I have been trying different NAS solutions on the Big Windows Home Server. This guide will show the base procedures for installing open-source NAS/ SAN appliances such as FreeNAS, OpenFiler, Ubuntu (and other Linux distros), OpenSolaris (and variants such as CentOS) into a Hyper-V VM. 

For this guide, I will be using screenshots from the Hyper-V manager in Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2. Microsoft offers a free Hyper-V Server R2 product for those that want to try and do not have access to a Server 2008 R2 testbed. Later I will detail installing the OS’es onto the Hyper-V platforms, but I wanted a base article that showed the basics so I can link rather than duplicate later (think of this as WordPress Dedupe). It should be noted up-front this guide is for a non-Windows Hyper-V installation. Also, everything below can be changed as necessary for your environment/ installation. 

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