I decided rather recently to rebuild my VMware Server running on RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) with Windows 2008 Enterprise Core running Hyper-V. I currently use a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with approximately 16GB RAM and Dual Quad Processors. To make matters more complicated I don't run any Windows Machines at home, I only have my corporate laptop running Vista. This meant that the only PC I had was in a different domain than the Hyper-V server.

This is my first “real” experience with Windows 2008 Core so I wasn't as familiar with the commands as I should be. The install was quick and without issue. Then matters got complicated. Windows Firewall was enabled complicating matters and making it difficult to work with. I ended up completely disabling the firewall until after I got things setup. After setup I enabled to firewall and everything continued to work.

On the Client I had to enable Anonymous DCOM to get Hyper-V manager to work. I then used CMDKEY to save my credentials so I didn't have to type them anymore. The first link below contained some great information on the using Hyper-V without joining the domain. There are some manual edits that have to be done of the AzMan store for Hyper-V which is pretty easy to walk through. Now, beyond some occasional hiccups with the client, things appear to work.

The following links are full of great information:

http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/
http://winserverteam.org.uk/blogs/mark/
http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/guyt/
http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/

I'm working on trying to figure out why Network Performance is horrible.  Other than network performance the machines appear very snappy, especially the Windows 2008 systems.  This could be a bug with TCP offload (google had some information on that) or the lack of the Dell Driver.  Not really sure which yet.