After setting up my dad’s office with a HP DL370G5 with Windows 2008 Server and Hyper-V, I was thinking that it would be helpful to have a system around the house for my own purposes. I have an MSDN subscription, but Andy pointed out that there’s the free Microsoft Hyper-V Server SKU for people that don’t or want a minimalist setup.
Given that I’m not exactly an enterprise, I wanted to keep the cost of the project pretty low, and even HP business refurbished hardware isn’t cheap. My next thought was to put together my own system from parts on NewEgg, but didn’t have much success. The tricky part about getting hardware that isn’t certified for use with Hyper-V is that most, nay all, OEMs shy away from actually telling you if their particular motherboards support the AMD or Intel virtualization extensions. While I could try out different boards, I disliked the idea of spending weeks shipping stuff back and forth for testing if hardware virtualization was supported. It didn’t help that I wanted a solution that I could use immediately.
I decided that getting the hardware I wanted at a local store would be the best approach, despite the fact that I might incur the wrath of a restocking fee. I brought along my Acer Aspire one to write down possible candidates, which didn’t draw too many strange looks, surprisingly enough. First up was Office Depot, which only had five desktops, total. Even worse, none of the CPUs in those devices were capable of hardware virtualization. Best Buy was a bit better, but the prices there started at $400 and quickly went up from there. As well, while the sales associate at Best Buy didn’t seem to mind letting me peruse the BIOS settings on floor models, I couldn’t find any systems whose BIOSes claimed to support hardware virtualization. Granted, I didn’t really want to check the more expensive systems.
I went home for dinner and looked around NewEgg some more. At this point, I thought that I’d just bite the bullet and get the right cpu with a motherboard whose chipset should support it. I ended up making one more trip out to see what Walmart had around. I wrote down the different model numbers and retreated to the car to Google bits about the hardware. As it turns out, one of the models, the Compaq Presario SR5413WM ($400 at my local Walmart, $358 online at time of writing) contained an ASUS M2N68-LA (Ivy8) Motherboard. Since Walmart has a generous return policy, and both the CPU and Chipset on that board seemed to support hardware virtualization, I decided to take a chance and try it out.
As it turns out, that wasn’t too bad of an idea. It works with Windows Server 2008 out of the box and I only needed to enable virtualization in the BIOS under the advanced options to get the extensions and no-execute bits enabled. While the box comes with a single-core processor and 2GB of RAM, there’s a bit of room to grow, since the motherboard supports 4GB of RAM as well as a number of dual-core AMD X2 processors.
