Ok, so, this post has been delayed for quite some time. in part 1 of this series, i talked about Media. And in part 2, i talked about Photography. these where both looking forward, at what could go wrong. Well, part 3 is now looking back. The upgrade of the Mac PRo to run Win2k8Srv happened about 6 weeks ago, and so far, so good. some notes below.

  • Some things i want to play with (Channel 4 On Demand, Sky Player) wont work, but thats not because of Windows Server. thats because they dont play nice with 64 bit machines. This sucks! When will Channel 4 or Sky get proper developers in and fix the problem?
  • Hyper-V rocks, but as a solution to the above problem, well, its not. Hyper-V does not have a sound card, so, no sound… In reality, makes sense. how many times have you installed a sound card in a server?
  • the speed of this thing rocks! everything seems faster, responds quicker, and runs more stable. ok, i have had no crashes with Vista, but i have a sense that its more stable… probably just me…
  • The iPhone, iPod touch and iPod classic all sync well with iTunes. no problems there. it even talks with my Apple TV without issue!
  • I havent used the big DSLR camera in a while, but my small point and shoot one works perfect. plug in, download and see everything recorded! very nice.
  • Back to Hyper-V and speed. I currently have 3 VMs running under Hyper-V: Win2k8 Enterprice, Win2k8 Web and a Virtual Cacti install. Everything still responds quickly, and the only slow down i have is if all 3 VHDs and the host need something of the HDD. Since all are sitting on one single spindle… This is my problem, and adding more drives should solve it…
  • all my coding tools work grand on this, and because its a Server OS, i can install a Full SQL Box directly on the machine, which has its advantages!

So, there you have it. all is going well after 6 weeks, give or take. if anyone has any questions, leave a comment!