Exactly... My home lab/network has acquired wife and daughter approval factor for anything I do.. I did it to myself! In reply to this post and the OP:
For example: * In the living room is an HTPC with Windows Media Center that has 3TB of storage, an InfiniTV 4 channel cable card tuner and two dual channel analog tuners... Yes that's 8 channels at once that can be recorded... In each bedroom there is an Xbox Slim that is set to boot as a Windows Media Center Extender. This achieves multi-room DVR that is pretty much better than most solutions provided by cable companies. * In the basement a machine runs Windows Home Server with 5+TB of storage as VM in hyper-v. Installed is the "My Movies" plug in. This plugin is also installed on Windows Media Center. My movies is basically like Plex, but it integrates with Windows Media Center, works on the extenders, and integrates with Windows Home Server 2011 and Windows Server 2012 Essentials. The plugin installs a free edition of MS SQL Server and is no joke... * Along with the Netflix plugin for WMC, the wife has me maintain an extensive list of movies that are obtained through various means. I remux them from MKV/MP4 to M2TS using MKVmerge, tsmuxer, and when needed, convert DTS to AC3, PopCorn MKV AudioConvter... so that the movies are Xbox friendly. Even though the Xbox's are Windows Media Center Extenders, the files are streamed as is to the Xbox rather than frames/sound, so the Xbox must be able to decode them. * An extensive list of cartoons/educational cartoons is also maintained as My Movies can also track TV series by season and episode.
Sooooo God forbid any of this goes down. Up until recently the Windows Home Server was in a 4U running on bare metal... However I want to migrate to 2012 Essentials and be able to take machines down if needed. So what did I do? Go nuts... that's what I did.
If I want to do any maintenance on the main hyper-V host: * I detach the 5TB array. * Power up HV2 * Complete Shared Nothing Migrations of My DC and Homeserver (which includes the critical media vhdx) VM's * Power down HV1 and do whatever...
I run Hyper-V at home because my shop is a vmware environment and vmware isn't really free with the vcenter/vpshere non-sense. Everything I know about Hyper-V is learned at home... so on top of providing services... I gain a lot of knowledge and experience.
What I described above lives in 2 4U whitebox machines with Supermicro sever boards. On top of all of that, I have another 4U with a collection of old drives internally as well as a 4U direct attached storage unit with even more drives... all pooled with DriveBender so I can backup everything. The U's add up and it made me build a custom 32U rack out of 2x4's and rails.