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I was hoping to get some feedback from people who have virtualized Windows 2000 guests using Hyper-V. I have 20-30 Windows 2000 web servers that I'm looking to virtualize with Hyper-V but from what I can tell, there seems to be some serious drawbacks to virtualizing Windows 2000 with Hyper-V.

Has anybody done this? What are your thoughts? For Windows 2000 virtualization are we better off going with VMWare?

Will
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What serious drawbacks have you heard of? The primary problem with virtualizing Windows 2000 is the fact that W2K doesn't support VSS, which means you can't do an online P2V... you have to shut it down to virtualize the server. This is an OS limitation and not a virtualization platform limit though, and applies to both Hyper-V and VMWare.

Sean Earp
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We took a old p3 Xeon physical machine and virtualized it to hyper-v server and it worked great. It’s much faster than the old hardware it was on. That being said it was a low use machine we kept around for a few legacy apps (asp web apps and sql 2000), but you could tell a definite speed increase over the old machine. It did go to a dell poweredge 2950 box that had 8 cores and 12 gig of ram, so I'm sure that's part of it too.

Overall I've been happy with hyper-v server. We ended up going with it because I like the path that it was heading on the free side over what vmware was doing for free. Both are good platforms but for people like me that are primarily windows shops and have a very very small virtualization budget it's great.

Barden
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  • As a quick followup the last machine we went from 2000 server to hyper-v we used the xen convert tool which is free and worked great. – Barden Mar 16 '11 at 01:37
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I have run dos 6 and Windows 3 on hyper v (for a joke!). I have not really seen any problems and it should work fine, that being said however, as a personal choice I would go with VMWare if I had the option - I am sure hyper V will get there, but I would like to see another version or two before I fully trusted it.

William Hilsum
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  • So you haven't seen any problems and it works fine, but you don't trust it because...it isn't there yet? What is it lacking? – Sean Earp Jul 29 '09 at 05:07
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    Personally, I just love some of the advanced features of ESX, little things like memory over using (I have 4x guests each with 4GB running on a box that had 8GB... each doesn't go above 1GB), VMotion, recovery tools... A few of these features are making it in to Hyper-V r2, (which is RTM now), but I would just like to see it mature a little more.... If you just plan on converting and leaving it up 24/7 without touching it, Hyper-V will work for you! If you are like me and like fidling even when it is working, you want ESX! – William Hilsum Jul 29 '09 at 13:39