I am planning on running WHS 2011 along side unRAID and was wondering if anybody here knows how ESXi handles windows activation.  If I activate WHS 2011 in a ESXi vurtiral environment will I be able to install WHS 2011 as the main operating system on the same computer if I decide to stop using ESXi?

..don't know about WHS specifically, but your license should be good to go for one host at a time.

Re-installing on bare metal instead of in a VM is the same as switching hardware...so you might be forced to re-activate.

If you swap hardware too fast, online activation might be disabled and you should be able to do so by phone, explaining what you did.

As long as you are not violating the license agreement, you can re-activate as often as you wish.

The only problem is that WHS  2011 is OEM.  OEM MS software cannot be reactivated.

The only problem is that WHS  2011 is OEM.  OEM MS software cannot be reactivated.

That is MS policy. However... if the motherboard it was originally activated on died and was repaired UNDER WARRANTY, they will reactivate it for you over the phone. Read between the lines if you must.

I am planning on running WHS 2011 along side unRAID and was wondering if anybody here knows how ESXi handles windows activation.  If I activate WHS 2011 in a ESXi vurtiral environment will I be able to install WHS 2011 as the main operating system on the same computer if I decide to stop using ESXi?

 

Why using WHS 2011? Such a bloated beast. I'm always asking this because I can't see the benefit unless you need a specific function it does that another OS does not. I use a Windows 7 Enterprise box for some file sharing and some "server" type stuff and can't see any need for like a bloated OS like WHS. I mean homegroups and all that are just shared mapped folders and such, right? Not being arrogant, just curious.

 

 

A couple of months ago I had a power outage and unraid did not shutdown correctly.  When this happened I one of my hard drives showed as failed and I did not have a replacement so I copied all the data off of that disk using parity deleted the config and started a parity sync.  Then during the sync the drive that I copied all my data to was getting errors so I did the process again.  The drive that I copied all the data to started getting errors during the sync again so I just scraped the set up and started with a fresh copy of unraid 5-RC8 and started the process of testing my drives using WD drive tool.  All drives passed so I started preclearing each drive and was getting error, did a mem test and found out I had bad memory.  I replaced the memory and started preclearing drives, if I didn't get errors, writing 0's was very slow at less than 500KB/s.  So I loaded up unraid 4.7 to test the preclear with a stable version and it worked fine, no errors on my 1.5TB drives, witch is great but I have mostly 3TB drives.

 

All in all unraid 5 is not working correctly for me and my hope was that version 5 final would be out soon.  Until version 5 final is out I am dead in the water with my main computer completely full.  I need something to switch too until the final release and then try getting unraid up and running.

 

If I was able to get unraid up and running I was going to use ESXi with unraid, OS X, linux and others.  I figured I can get ESXi with WHS 2011 and then when unraid is ready make the swap back.