Does running one Virtual Machine on a HYPER-V box make sense?

Solution 1:

We do this with one of our demo environments for the sole reason that it can easily be backed up, blown away or moved to a developer's machine for tweaking.

The reason why we only run one is due to the high system requirements of the demo (CPU usage and memory usage). Having multiple running at the same time is not feasible.

Solution 2:

While Jim is correct about the additional administrative overhead, virtualizing the server now will allow you to easily move it to a different server a week, a month, or a year from now when you have newer/better/faster hardware to run the virtual machine. You didn't mention the workload (I/O intensive applications like SQL server would not be the best candidates), and the decision is certainly about making tradeoffs, but if your priorities are around disaster recovery and server mobility, I'd say go for it.

Solution 3:

If you're getting your feet wet with virtualization, I'd say it's definitely worth it for the learning process alone. You gain a degree of hardware independence - isolated hardware failure involves minimal downtime of any critical system before it's spun up on a different host.

Nobody's even mentioned how fearless you can be about installing patches and version upgrades to VMs, since catastrophic problems are erased with a snapshot. This saves me a lot of time, and has allowed us to make some improvements we couldn't afford in risk/downtime previously.

The ease of future consolidation has already been brought up. I think overall, it's a step forward.

Solution 4:

Its not a bad idea, but I would try it out first to see how your performance it. It will make it real easy to move machines in the future when you do upgrade. You are not doubling the OS since the Hyper-V part of it is designed to not consume resources it doesn't need but you would have to ensure its properly take care of.

I would take a look at ESXi from VMWare. its a 32meg hyper visor, scaled down on features but is designed for a production setup.