Suggestions needed... Returning newbie.

[hjmillertx]

I signed up for the Amahi site ~6 months ago after my WHS was giving me issues. At the time, my opinion was that staying with WHS2011 and adding some WHS plug-ins would work well enough for my needs and was clearly the path of least resistance. So I tossed the Amahi investigation and reloaded WHS with purchased add-ins...

That worked for 5 months until my 10+ year old hardware Power Supply & MotherBoard died. I rebuilt & modernized my HW and I'm ready to get some sort of server up & running. From my initial investigation on Amahi, I had 2 areas of concern:
1) VPN into my home-based Windows PCs/laptops was poorly documented. For me doing a Remote Desktop into 2 of my home computers is a requirement.
2) Across the various forums, FAQs and Wikis getting clear consistent information is not easy for me to acquire. On WHS, the system is fairly fixed and has a "comfortable", for me, Microsoft flavor.

I retired a few years ago after a 5 year stint as a SW Development manager that was after a 26 year career in computer HW development & management. For me, some of the responses in the forums are a real challenge. Yet I love learning so what I'd like to do is:

1) Put VirtualBox on my new HW with Fedora as the Host OS
2) Add Amahi into the Host OS
3) Add WHS2011 as a guest OS on the Virtual Box

My thoughts are that this will get me up and running very quickly. I will initially be using the WHS VM as my server. As I find, discover & use more and more features of Amahi I can eventually have the WHS VM will go away.

Help & suggestions needed:
. Are the 3 items above easily doable? Any gotchas I should look out for? Any other suggestions or configurations?
. What version of Fedora is recommended? I found conflicting information in the forum.
. Has anyone else tried putting WHS on VirtualBox?

[bigfoot65]

. Are the 3 items above easily doable? Any gotchas I should look out for? Any other suggestions or configurations?

Yes from my experience I would say they are doable. Using OpenVPN is probably your best bet for remoting into machines in your network. There will be far more Amahi and internet documentation to lead you to a solution.

. What version of Fedora is recommended? I found conflicting information in the forum.

There is only one version of Fedora currently supported for Amahi and that is Fedora 19. We hope to move to Fedora 21 soon. For the Host VM, it can be any flavor of Linux you choose or even Windows. The VM itself must be Fedora 19 for Amahi to run.

. Has anyone else tried putting WHS on VirtualBox?

This one I don't have the answer, but a quick search of the internet should yield results.

I personally find using Proxmox much easier for VMs vs VirtualBox. It runs on Linux and setting up VMs is quite simple. I run linux and Windows machines as VMs. My current HDA is a VM, all running on a single 8-core, 16GB RAM machine with 4 hard drives.

[hjmillertx]

Thanks for the rapid reply...

After further reading, I think I had a few misconceptions so let me clarify to be sure.

. Amahi is a self contained package including the OS and various features making up the HDA. Therefore I wouldn't load Amahi into an existing host OS running a Virtual Environment. Instead I would load Amahi including its OS as a guest OS into a Virtual Machine.

. Adding general Linux apps into Amahi may be difficult, especially for someone who hasn't done programming for 20+ years. While adding a general app is doable, I should review the approved apps for Amahi to see if my server needs are met with those apps. (I think it would be.)

. Running WHS2011 and Amahi as VMs with a Promox VE seems doable. I found an example of WHS VM as well as discussions of Amahi WM with Promox . I haven't found any examples of running WHS and Amahi together on a common VE. The network addressing of both VMs may be a challenge. My motherboard has 2 Ethernet connections yet WHS has fixed port assumptions. I don't know about Amahi port requirements.

Are my assumptions correct?

Does Promox come with some sort of virus protection? (I know this is not the forum for that but....)

[bigfoot65]

. Amahi is a self contained package including the OS and various features making up the HDA. Therefore I wouldn't load Amahi into an existing host OS running a Virtual Environment. Instead I would load Amahi including its OS as a guest OS into a Virtual Machine.

Amahi is an add-on to the OS. The Express DVD is a Fedora mix if you will with the OS. Yes it would be come a VM as a guest OS.

. Adding general Linux apps into Amahi may be difficult, especially for someone who hasn't done programming for 20+ years. While adding a general app is doable, I should review the approved apps for Amahi to see if my server needs are met with those apps. (I think it would be.)

Most are fairly simple. The Amahi store does contain several apps that most users would want on their server.

I haven't found any examples of running WHS and Amahi together on a common VE. The network addressing of both VMs may be a challenge. My motherboard has 2 Ethernet connections yet WHS has fixed port assumptions. I don't know about Amahi port requirements.

You can easily run them on a VM together. If needed, you could bridge them to a separate subnet for each. You can also run them on the same subnet and just have different IP addresses assigned.

Does Promox come with some sort of virus protection?

Typically virus protection is not needed for Linux. It does not get hacked/hit with as much bad stuff as Microsoft-based OSes do. If you really need one, there are a few free providers for virus scanning on Linux. One is ClamAV.

[hjmillertx]

Bigfoot65,
Your response time is GREAT!!! Clearly better then my time to get back to the Forum. My plan is to start the installation process this coming Monday. After reading thru forum notes, I'll start a new thread if I run into any issues.

On a related topic: Some items on your Site's Technology page may be misleading such as:
" C.1. Linux Apps
Our foundation is Linux. If you are a power user and you are comfortable under the hood with Linux, you can install any apps you want, like an IMAP daemon, a MythTV back-end of front-end, web apps, etc. We hope to make installing Linux apps easier over time through porting them into HDA'ized apps. "

This implied to me that general Linux apps may be tough to install...

[bigfoot65]

Most Linux apps should be easy to install. It depends on the app as to the level of difficulty.

The Web-Apps plugin may be helpful with your endeavor.