IT Pro Momentum Dogtown LLC Powered by Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7

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momentum Here is a great little upgrade project for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

Company name: Dogtown LLC

Public disclosure of your name and company name allowed? Yes

Objectives of the project:   Migrate my home office from 3 workstations running a mixture of Windows Vista and XP and no servers to 3 workstations running Windows 7 and a server running Windows Server 2008 R2 as a domain controller, virtual machine hosting, and file share hub.

Are you piloting or deploying the products? Piloting with the intention of deployment.

Products used in the project (all that apply): Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, Windows Vista

Project description:   Part of this project meant that I would need to purchase hardware to act as the server. Not wanting to spend a ton of money I invested in a small dual-core Intel Atom solution with 2gb of ram and a 1tb hard drive. Total Hardware Cost: $280.  I was actually very pleasantly surprised by how well such a lightweight machine ran both Server 2003 R2 and Server 2008 R2 very smoothly. Unfortunately the n330 atom doesn't support Intel-VT for virtualization, so I could not run Hyper-V as a solution for virtualization. However, I did get VMWare Server 2.0 running without a problem.  I'm still in the process of migrating the workstations from Vista to 7. I have one workstation up and running with Win 7 RC, and with 7 RTM being released this week I expect to have them all over to 7 in the next month or so.

Were the objective stated at the beginning satisfied?   Outside of not being able to use Hyper-V due to hardware limitations I met all the objectives I set out to initially achieve.

Are you going to save money? How much over how many years?   For a person like myself who has a day job that is unrelated to IT, but has a passion for IT and a desire to learn all he can about it.  The biggest barrier was and always will be software licensing cost.  TechNet provides an eloquent solution to this problem. The annual subscription fees are reasonable enough for me to invest in, and the restrictions for software provided under the TechNet license do not hinder my goals, which is primarily to try out, evaluate, and learn the latest and greatest product offerings from Microsoft.

What do you think about the IT Pro Momentum program? Would you have done this project without the IT Pro Momentum program?   I think it's a great program, and for people like myself it opens new doors and opportunities that might not be afforded to us otherwise. I may have gone forward with this project without the program, but it would have meant me steering more towards open source solutions.  I'm thoroughly impressed by the program, and I hope to get a few more projects off of the ground in the coming months.