Running Hyper-V on Non Supported Hardware

[UnMortal]

This ML310 G4 HP server has manufactures drivers for up to Windows 2008 Server. However I was interested in running 2012 on it to serve as strictly a Hypervisor for 1 or 2 Windows 2012 R2 Standard Servers. I installed the Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 (no GUI) and was able to load a virtual instance of 2012 R2 Standard and it is operating normally. The Device manager on the Hyper-V Server is using some Microsoft generic drivers (video and others), and is missing some ILO drivers and "Base System Device" drivers. I don't care about ILO functionality.

My question is, am I getting a performance hit on the virtual server(s) because I don't have supported manufactures drivers installed on the Host OS? Beyond Performance concerns, would this be considered bad practice in a production network?

 

[Patriot]

You are getting a performance hit because it is 11 years old... I cannot recommend putting that into a production environment.
For $300 you can grab a 1150 box that will run laps around this and draw a fraction of the power.

 

[UnMortal]

Thanks Patriot. It's really my only "Server Hardware" option right now. The alternative would be to set this up on a more modern workstation (Quad Core CPU 16GB Ram) with kind of run of the mill consumer parts. I will say that this server is doing some basic (AD, DNS, DHCP, maybe File Server) functions in a small network and will be playing second fiddle to a new Dell PowerEdge T320 Xeon 6Core 20GB Ram.

 

[weust]

What you could do, in the future, is to create a Failover Cluster from your current Hyper-V server, and add the new one.
Just keep in mind to set the CPU compatibility to "Migrate to a physical computer with a different processor version".
Then add all VM's to the cluster (configure role and select Virtual Machine, and it will show non-clustered VM's on the nodes).
This means you can migrate VM's in the cluster to the new node, and evict the old one.

You need to know how to properly set up a Failover Cluster though, and it's more then what I described above ;-)

Here at work I have a 10 node cluster of HP DL380 G7 and G8 servers. Their CPU's are almost equal, but not enough to allow VM's being Live Migrated to other nodes. Hence I select the compatibility option. Works great.