The Windows Home Server community continue to push the boundaries of what can be done on WHS environments. One of community, Pedro Innecco has recently published an article on his blog about running Linux on a Windows Home Server simultaneously.
Here is what you need:
- Upgraded server RAM. 512MB is unrealistic if you want to do anything with Windows Home Server besides its out-of-the-box features.
- A copy of Microsoft Virtual Server. At the time of writing this post, the last version was 2005 R2 SP1. Virtual Server is free and can be downloaded from here.
- A distribution of Linux. You can use Ubuntu however Pedro opted to use openSUSE because of the benefits it has from the interoperability agreement Novell has with Microsoft (e.g.: virtual machine additions). You can get openSUSE from here, and Ubuntu from here.
The blog article provides a step by step guide to setting the virtual environment so you can continue to use WHS and use the Linux environment.
If you would like to try it and post your experiences, you can do so on this thread on the WGS Forums.
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:05 am
Hi,
While this is one way of doing it, i would realy suggest to use http://www.colinux.org insted, its more of a native implemention, use less memory and runs in generel better.
//leon - http://www.startforce.com
June 3rd, 2008 at 1:57 pm
But here they are talking about running a Linux distribution no an specific one. with this setup you can run anything and its great to take down the number of machine needed for testing purpose.
June 3rd, 2008 at 5:23 pm
I’ve actually been wondering about running both WHS and Linux under Hyper-V. My current WHS doesn’t quite have the juice for that, but it’s tempting….