I just upgraded my Windows Server 2008 installation on my 2 year old MacBook Pro. I dared and did an inplace upgrade to R2, as I didn't want to go through all the hassle of reinstalling the different drivers for the MacBook Pro again. I was happy to find that the upgrade process was straight-forward with no major obstacles: only the error message that comes up to warn about the Hyper-V service, which as stated should be switched off for the upgrade ...except
John Howard clarifies that it shouldn't!
I also had configured several "Vista-like" features for my Server 2008 (a great list of suggestions can be found
here,
here, and
here). As one would expect, some of those settings were deactivated/overwritten by the new install, but that is no real problem either.
What made me really happy was to see the improved performance and responsiveness of the whole setup, across the board. One key fact stands out here: the memory requirements of the new "Windows 7 Ultimate" virtual machine I then installed are about 50% lower than the Vista virtual machine I had been running so far: it uses no more than 450MB, as can be seen here:
This is great news, as I like to run only my core applications such as Office off the Host, use a dedicated Server VM for SharePoint development, and have a separate VM to trial new software, so to avoid to screw up my host.
As my MacBook Pro model doesn't allow me to use more than 4GB of RAM I was previously limited to running only 1 VM at a time. No I can keep 2-3 VMs running with no recognizable performance problems.
I was close to buying a new machine, which I usually do every two years, but with the new setup I'll probably be able to postpone that for quite a while :-)
Update: A friend of mine passed the Bootcamp 3.0 drivers on to me ...and I was very happy to find that FINALLY it is possible to "tap/click" using the MacBook's trackpad.