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?
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.
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.
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.