virtualbox.org

Hi, I am just looking into virtualbox, so I have no previous knowledge or experience of it. Please treat me as a novice in terms of any answers!

I currently run a Windows Home Server (WHS) V1 (basically a simplified version of Windows SBS 2003) which the family use the save music, homework, photos, etc. so I need to keep the server accessible. The problem is that Microsoft stopped supporting it last year, so there are no more security updates being issued.

I am thinking about moving over the a Linux based home server like Linux MCE or Amahi, but I want to try them before committing to switch the family across and getting irate complaints about access problems, etc.

I recently upgraded the server hardware to Intel Core i7 processor with 8Gb of ram, so I don't want to replace the hardware. It occurred to me that if I could move the WHS onto a virtualbox install, I could keep it accessible to the family and then I could run a second virtual machine with one of the test server environments on it. Once I've decided which way to go, I could then move the data across and shut down the old virtual WHS.

Has anyone done anything like this before? Does WHS work in a virtual environment (one of my concerns is the clever disk management system WHS has - how does that cope with a virtual environment?).

Any feedback, preferably from experience, would be really appreciated.

I would suggest you read about Plex. https://plex.tv/
I have used it for a long time and it works great.

move the WHS onto a virtualbox install

This is called P2V. You can google "P2V site:forums.virtualbox.org" Also see Migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox

FWIW you may still be able to get the security updates in a new install of WHS, instead of migrating the old one.

You will probably not be able to access the physical disks the WHS accessed when it was on the physical hardware. You will have to copy all the data into the virtual disks to continue serving via the virtualized WHS.

You could try sharing all the data to another PC where you try the other house server OS's. This would leave your WHS running and untouched. Or take your WHS off the internet if you don't need to share outside your house, and use another PC with a newer OS to save data into the WHS system (this could be done running the other OS as a guest in Virtualbox running on the WHS).