installing windows server 2008 or SBS 2008 on MAC

hello everybody,

am very new with MAC, and i need all the help i can get from you the experts.
i need to install windows server 2008 or SBS 2008 on the mac along with the OS.

i have Macbook Pro 15", 2.6 Intel Core i7, 8G Ram, running OS X ver 10.8

through bootcamp, i was able to install windows 7 with no problem, but it was a big pain to get the server version installed.. whenever i try to install it, i get an error message after the second restart in the installation process.
the message says, that the windows is unable to configure the settings on this machine, and it asks me to restart the installation.

i did try the parallels and vm fusion, they were able to pass that error message, but they frizzed right after the last restart of the installation.

am so fed up with the this problem, i changed the model of my mac two times, hoping i can find a better machine, but with no luck.

any body can help me?

thanks

The short answer is that Windows Server 2008 is not supported, and as far as I'm aware, neither is SBS 2008. Only Windows 7 is supported on your MBP.

Going a bit further, there may be a future update to the Boot Camp assistant and Windows supporting software that may provide for Windows 8, server, and SBS. But as of right now there is no official support.

chscag is correct, however, Server 2008 and SBS 2008 are both supported in Parallels/Fusion/VirtualBox. There's no reason to install it natively. I can't imagine that you'd install it on a notebook if you intended to use it for the things a server OS is normally needed for, so it shouldn't be a huge stretch to install it on a VM.

It would help tremendously if you could tell us a little bit about what you intend to do with Server 2008 once it's installed.

thank you guys, its nice to see some fast reaction..

i did try the VM programs as i had mentioned earlier, and both Parallels and fusion, but neither one of them was able to finish the install.

and as read different posts on the internet, some people were actually installed and are using the server version already.. but none of them are replying to my posts.

i want to continue my studies in the windows server, and i was hoping that i would be able to finally switch to MAC and continue my studies at the same time.

VMWare Fusion should be able to install Server 2008 with no problems. In my professional life, I work in IT and most, if not all of our servers run on VMWare clusters - and we're talking about hundreds of servers. At what point in the installation does it fail?

Bootcamp. Windows 7 64 bit and windows 2008 r2 share the same driver model, so you could install Windows 2008 R2 and install the same drivers used for Windows 7 64 bit esp. display and network.