What I`m going to do next week with Windows Server "8"

I have just received a HP Proliant Microserver for my lab.

This tiny little sexy thing is about to leverage some cool features in Windows Server “8”.

Current setup:

HP Proliant Microserver – installed with 4 x 1 TB SATA disks with RAID 0 and RAID

I have installed Windows Server “8” Beta and played around with storage pools and storage spaces.I have also tested the built-in iSCSI target in Windows Server “8”, which is currently hosting my Hyper-V 2008 R2 clustered VMs.

The Microserver has currently only 1 NIC, which should give you a hint that it`s possible to simulate the foundation of a private cloud using budget hardware.

As I stated in my previously post, I will have 2 clusters. One 2008 R2 running System Center 2012 workloads for POC, and one Windows Server “8” cluster with the new and improved version of Hyper-V.

So while it`s currently running the SC 2012 workloads (which works pretty good, and I was able to deliver 4 hours of presentations/demos today, using this environment), I am looking forward to build the next generation of Hyper-V clusters next week with Windows Server “8”.

I have currently all my W8 workloads running on my lap top (yeah, Windows Server “8” directly on my lap top, forcing me to deal with powershell and other stuff that I wanna be able to manage), and I will use/test/play with the different migration options to move my workloads over to the Hyper-V 3.0 Cluster, with no downtime, using my WiFi.

I`ll post the examples and demos next week.