Running Hyper-V on a 2010 8-Core Mac Pro

Mac Pro has the following specs:

• 2 - 2.4Ghz Quad Core processors (16 virtual cores)
• 32GB of RAM
• 3 - 1TB Western Digital Cavier Black HDs
• 1 - 2TB Western Digital Cavier Black HD
• 30 inch cinema display (2560 x 1600)

I've had my 2010 8-core (duel 2.4 GHZ) Mac Pro for a few weeks now and the performance running Regular Mac Apps (including VMware Fusion has been great. However, I thought it was time to take it to the next level and put my TechNet Professional subscription to good use by running a true (type 1) hypervisor since Fusion seems to get unresponsive after using 16GB of RAM. 

Installation was a fairly painless, I used the Apple Boot Camp assistant to create a 700GB partition for the Windows Server 2008 R2 (x64) Enterprise installation on the stock 1TB Western Digital Hard Drive. Installed the operating system, installed the Apple Boot Camp drivers, downloaded OS operating system hotfixes and SP1 for 2008 Server then I was ready to rock! 

After enabling the Hyper-V role I was ready to create virtual machines. I decided to create a new lab using 30 day evaluation licenses for this test because I did not want to waste all of my TechNet activations with this test (even the host) so I decided to not activate anything and 30 days is more than enough time to play! 

One of the first tests I decided to do was create at least 10 virtual machines at the same time. I expected a fair amount of disk thrashing so I also used another disk for half of the virtual machines. This served me well and I ceased to have any disk performance problems once I started using another disk. Hyper-V makes good use of all available cores and memory, I had good system performance during my unscientific 10 virtual machine build. I continued this process until i had 21 virtual machines built with a mixture of Windows 2008, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 2003 R2, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Vista. Running several server side applications such as Exchange Server 2003, 2007, OCS 2007 R2 (IM and Presence). Currently in the process of introducing Lync Server 2010 and Exchange 2010. 

Since my Hyper-V server is not a member of a domain I did not install System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. I will install this later when I decide to build my Hyper-V server again! My next test with the Mac Pro is to install VMware ESXi 4.1 on the Mac Pro. Since I already have another ESX host I can simply move some of the VMs over and use my templates to build additional machines. Eventually I would like to get another server class machine (such as a Dell Poweredge) and have a permanent ESXi server. 

Thanks for reading and if you have any questions please post comments here!