I recently installed Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 R2 on my Windows 2003 Server. After adding an additional 2GB of RAM (for a total of 3GB), my Virtual Server was ready to host! (My server is only a single processor Intel Celeron, but it's got spare capacity most of the time).

(Yes, I've also installed Windows Home Server in a Virtual Machine ... I missed one feature -- the "free" dynamic IP to host name system.)

One nice feature of Virtual Server that is absent on VMware's free server virtualization product is the ability to specify the amount of CPU resources that are allocated to a specific virtual machine. (Another nice feature is that the web management tools are very snappy in comparison to the new beta tools for VMware Server 2.0 Beta).

Since my server is performing other tasks (like monitoring security cameras), I wanted to limit the impact the virtual servers have on the machine.

To setup Astaro, you'll need to register for a free account. I used a link provided by the SecurityNow podcast, http://www.astaro.com/security.now. Once you have a free account, you can download the ISO and burn it to a CD or install it in a virtual machine. Later you can request your non-commercial, home-only license.

You'll need to have two network cards or virtual adapters setup. I allocated 512MB of RAM, the documentation recommends a minimum of 256MB.

After a number of installation steps ... the lengthy installation progresses:

It took about 50 minutes to get through the installation (with a limited CPU):

Rebooted:

Pressed F2 for kicks...

No USB support under Virtual Server, so one failure ...

Interesting to see some of the services it uses, like MySQL:

And then nothing ... I couldn't login at all. I tried the default IP address and the one I had (thought) changed it to, and all interaction was met with the usual no web site error in IE. So, although Astaro looked interesting, I can't seem to get it to work on my Virtual Server.

It's using a surprising amount of CPU considering it's not doing anything useful for my network:

It's paused for now until I can figure it out. I was looking forward to trying some of the security and remote access (VPN) functionality.

I'll look around to see what other Linux distributions might be interesting to have in a Virtual Machine. Any suggestions?