Poor old Chungus the Proliant has lived a long, prosperous life but the entire time it has been in my possession (5 years?) it’s never had the original software installed on it. Thanks to a Visual Studio subscription, it ran Windows Server 2016, then 2019 for a while. Windows Server was an OK-ish workstation environment (other than some bluetooth niggles). Then, Docker decided to switch their Docker Desktop product over to WSL2. Since there was no easy way to get WSL2 on Server 2019, I switched it to Debian and moved everything to Docker community edition. However, the product sticker on the top of the machine with a license key for Windows Server 2008 has been taunting me for a while so I decided to do something about it.

QEMU slash KVM is the greatest time waster / most wonderful thing I have ever seen. Hyper-V is…OK I guess, but the QEMU setups are almost always noticeably faster than Hyper-V and Windows on the same hardware. Need a specific machine for a client job? Spin it up!. Want to relive fond memories of some old computing environment without tracking down working hardware? Spin it up! I have a small bunch of scripts I generally use to make these VMs and another whole machine to run them if they need to persist or I want them exposed to the internet. I also use refurbished HPE servers that have multiple ethernet interfaces in them, because that lets you run a high speed bridge / tap for your VMs and makes them appear on your local network as fully fledged participants. Not only is it more fun, it also makes exposing them to the actual internet much simpler. For me, it’s a killer way to have access to copies of client environments that wasn’t possible in the past.

Windows Small Business Server 2008 Premium

For starters, this version of Windows Server has been end of lifed. Good riddance you might say. I say, it does give you a little pause in terms of the security of exposing bits of it to the internet.

When this product was released, I was in a corporate environment and somebody else looked after the windows installations. In that case, it was Windows server enterprise. I had no idea there were “small business” versions of windows server until I saw the battered sticker on my box. Thanks to the magic of QEMU we can install it and see what it’s like. A Visual Studio subscription gives you access to the disk images of practically everything Microsoft ever produced, and gives you license keys to install them, but in this case, I already have one!

Here is a description of what small business server is. I gather it was for small workgroups who needed active directory, exchange and maybe SQL Server but the server was expected to be the only one on the local network. 2008 isn’t quite retro yet, although som