As I’ve mentioned in the past I’m not a supporter of Server Core as a Hyper-V plattform but when it comes to other roles I see it as a great option.
I’m currently building a new lab at my new employer and one of the things I wanted to try out was running SQL Server 2008 R2 on Server Core R2. It’s not totally straightforward, and most importantly not supported by Microsoft, but Joachim Nässlander has all the details in his blog.
The only thing that tripped me up, because I didn’t read the comments as I normally would, is that for the full version of SQL you need to add the “/IAcceptSQLServerLicenseTerms=true” to the install script.
Hyper-V according to me 