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- Barry
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ESXi (now vSphere) is the solution. Free for personal use too. It's a bare metal hypervisor so just provides a platform to install other operating systems that can run simultaneously, as if they were on separate physical hardware.
That way you can have a WIndows server for local network filesharing and media streaming, a linux server for apache to run a wordpress site and (say) owncloud to provide cloud storage. Those are just examples, other solutions are possible.
You would still need a licence for Windows when installed onto a hypervisor, just as if you installed it onto a standalone computer.
I run an ESXi server at home, but mines on an R710 server and there's nothing "micro" about that (it's also noisy with all the fans, and the SAS drives can sound like a flock of angry woodpeckers ).
Hmmm... Thought I'd go down this route - "ESXi 5.5 requires 4GB of Memory, you currently have 3.84GB" - Gotcha, installation held on to 126 MB so failed it's own test. (or returned a false negative)