Another excerpt from a (almost) monochromatic series of mine. Shot on a walk during last weekend.
Unfortunately, my gallery software doesn’t let me select which parts (photographers say “crops”) of the images to show. So feel free to click on one image to see it in full size (long side resized to 800px).
Cyrus-IMAPd has always been my favorite mailserver daemon. Shared folders, server-side sorting rules by SIEVE and the great manageability and configurability made it get into my heart.
But, Exchange Server tops it. Especially if you have already a PDA with Windows Mobile. Then you can sync all your data whenever Wifi connection is at hand and get appointments and emails pushed to you.
Such PDAs are shipped with Outlook
Installation of both features was so easy even my partner managed to get done. Well, she’s neither a layman nor a pro, so don’t get things wrong.
One important feature is missing from VMware Server 2 – the ability to make multiple snapshots. And I did not discover how to make snapshot hierarchies with it. (Although it is possible with Workstation 6 – screenshots here.)
That is something you can easily do with Hyper-V. On installing Exchange? Ever tried with/without DC? Forefront? Spamassassin? Combinations? Now it is possible. I have installed a Windows Server 2008, activated it and run a snapshot with Visual Studio installed, another without etc.
You can always revert your VM to a snapshot (in German horribly translated as “Snapshot anwenden”) and, in case you don’t need it anymore, safely delete it. The next time you power off/shutdown your VM the delta will get integrated. Plus, you can assign a different drive for your snapshots. Handy!
Tore Lervik, the programmer behind the sidebar widget, has written a script which utilizes snapshot functionality for backups. But beware: There is no data de-duplication, therefore your backup space will get filled very vigorously:
Some weeks ago I have deployed two virtual machines to run my Windows Homeserver
VMware Server 2 build 8xxxx has not started my VMs after host’s reboots and repeatedly asked whether I copied the machines or moved it. There was no default in order to avoid these silly questions as I did neither. Obviously this must be something with my second harddrive containing the VMs. Then, build 101586 crashed my host every time a VM started…
A nice thing has been the web access for administration and the option to utilize VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure [Client], but in summa these demanded quite a big portion of my RAM (about 500 MB). The fact that 2 GB of guest RAM grew to an usage of about 3.5 GB host’s RAM usage made me move to Hyper-V.
The latter consumes only about 2.5 GB RAM and network performance increased significantly! Where VMware limits the guests’ network speed to the one the host is connected (say 100 MBit), Hyper-V creates a virtual net “above” your host’s networking device, with 10 GBit. Therefore I can transfer data from/to my Homeserver with full speed. Excellent!
I/O-Performance is quite good, and for computing performance I do not have the tools to measure it. Honestly spoken, it is not that relevant as I run an fileserver and a mailserver for definitely under 25 users.
But, there is still some bugs in Hyper-V. I could not manage to copy VMs and trivial importing/exporting did not work.
On moving to Hyper-V? Make sure you check these out:
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