Windows under Fedora or Fedora under Windows with Amahi?

[heartspeace]

... or something else?

I have Windows only versions of some server applications I will need to run with my home server.
Vail is not stable enough to consider it in preview release.
I have legal access to most MS server products/OS products
I have a nice machine to run this on - its ones of the latest AMD chipsets/cpu on a nice motherboard with lots of storage.

1) Should I run Windows 2008R2 VirtualBox->Fedora->Amahi and have other applications run under windows? (concern here is reliability of file server... didnt consider Amahi until 5.3 with folder redundancy. What to go Vail route but just not stable enough and no details on how to access ntfs drives.

2) Fedora->Amahi and Fedora->virutalbox->Windows 7 x64 (or other flavor of windows - please state which would work well under virtualbox or already have images. I have keys).

Obviously concern is file safety along with serving these files to multiple machines in house over gigabit network. I am leading toward the native Fedora route - but need to know how - be ensured - to allow Windows to run underneath it in virtualbox (or other vm server) and have it access the file repository. (Need the later to happen either way I go - option 1 or 2).

If I am overlooking a better option let me know.



HP

[cpg]

hi, nice poll, however, due to incompatibility with the theme and the version of the forum software, the polls don't work

it really depends on the loads of the apps, file serving, etc.

i've never tried WHS, so i cannot recommend it one way or another.

vmware server had some small issues with fedora 12. small but technical enough that many non-technical people may not get over them (this was a little while ago - may be solved by now).

i think virtualbox works, but it's a desktop app, if i am not mistaken.

if you plan to stick with amahi, maybe use that on real hardware as you wean out of the microsoft stronghold you are in

it does sound like nice hardware. my hardware is old and shitty, but it still ran vmware ok.

[moredruid]

if your hardware can handle it: VMWare ESXi! Then you can run both next to each other without issues, and if you ever want to fool around you can create a snapshot first or create a new VM (e.g. by cloning) in a few minutes. Sounds the way to go for what you want.

[heartspeace]

I assume your talking about the free version of ESXi and not the licensed. I suspect my hardware can handle it but it remains the same essential problem just at a different level. Which then do I allow to control the shares and considering one might be whs can amahi access that across vms efficiently? Don't know what amahi can read or how to connect that over a vm to whs or win28kr2. Or if I let amahi handle the drives whs seems impossible with shared folders then I suspect I would simply do a win installation.

Hp

[moredruid]

wrt ESXi, that's indeed the free version.

Amahi can both serve and use windows shares. I would let Amahi serve the shares and use Windows for the applications that really need that platform. Sharing across VMs is probably the most efficient although you do get some overhead for networking due to the protocol being used (SMB protocol). On ESXi 3.5 he theoretical max throughput from windows VM to windows VM is around 1.6Gbps; from linux vm to linux vm around 2.6Gbps. Unfortunately a windows to linux vm test wasn't done, but I suspect it to be the lowest common denominator, thus 1.6Gbps.

You can assign parts of your storage to the VMs, I'm not sure how NTFS holds up with multiple connections to a volume (i.e. shared storage), I do know some linux filesystems support this (OCFS & GFS) - this would mean you could access the storage from both Windows and Linux simultaneously. A cursory Google search reveals that Windows/NTFS is unable to cope with this unless you implement clustering and even then it would probably be a failover setup with exclusive locking on the whole filesystem, Microsoft tends to lag around 5 years behind in the real datacenter arena - with that I mean simultaneous access to 1 shared storage (LUN) by for example 8 or 20 clients (GFS2 has a max of the number of journals that have been created (tunable), OCFS2 a max of 32, both have existed for at least 4 years).