Any issues with this home setup? Hyper-V in Server 2012

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iroc409

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I have a Server 2012 Essentials box running on a Dell T20 with 8GB RAM & a G3220. Currently it's basically just doing RWA and backups. I have a virtual Win 7 installation running for remote use, and that's all it is doing.

I have another 16GB RAM coming in, and I would like to install a virtual Sophos UTM, and possibly a Guacamole server on the machine. I am also looking at running Plex on the server itself.

Are there any issues running all this as Hyper-V roles on the Server 2012 install, or am I much better off going with a bare Hyper-V or ESXi installation? I was thinking it would be a lot easier to manage and work with to just install the new VMs on the existing server. It sounds like the only downside is there may be more reboots of the base server than a bare Hyper-V machine, but I don't know that is a major issue.

My only other issue is if there would be any security concerns with this setup. I'd like to have Sophos run a reverse proxy for the RWA and Guacamole. I'll still have a perimeter firewall/router, so it won't be completely exposed externally.

ETA: The virtual machines currently have a dedicated NIC, and I would install a dual-NIC Intel adapter for the UTM.
 
Running Sophos UTM as a VM on a Windows 2012 R2 server with the Hyper-V role installed myself. Works just fine. Dedicated a single NIC just for the WAN connection and the other physical NIC goes to my home network.
 
Plex can be very CPU hungry when transcoding, I am not sure how well a dual core proc will run it whilst the cores are also busy with other tasks. I have never run it on anything less then quad.
 
Yeah, I thought that would be the case, and expect I may need to update the CPU in the server. I still haven't worked out if I am going to go with Plex or build a PC-based HTPC, so I figure I would start with the dual core and see how far it gets me.
 
I've done plex on a dual-core Phenom - depending on what quality you're transcoding, it can be just fine. Blu-rays take a while to buffer up enough being done, but DVD quality video comes through just fine.
 
I'll concur as well. Plex can be very taxing on CPU when it has to transcode. I have a few BIG 1080p BR rips that take 30 sec to a minute to buffer and then come close to maxing out 4 cores. I've also noticed that the transcoding efficiency seems to be better in the Windows platform over the Linux. I ran the Linux server in an Ubuntu VM for a while and had nothing but stability and performance issues with it.
 
I don't have a BR drive in my desktop, so none of my media rips are BR; I've only ripped my DVD collection (I only have a few BR's). It would probably not be good to have a virtual network device in a bottleneck due to a media device.

I might need to install Plex first, and play with it to see if we'll like it. However, it sounds like running the extra machines in Server 2012 over a bare-metal hypervisor shouldn't be an issue.
 
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I didn't see storage mentioned, but all those vm's at the same time will need fast storage
 
dbwillis said:
I didn't see storage mentioned, but all those vm's at the same time will need fast storage
Click to expand...

Yeah, currently Server and the virtual Win 7 are running off a 1TB Constellation drive, which is "OK", but I'll move the VM's to a dedicated SSD.
 
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