I recently purchased a home lab server. After fiddling around with different hypervisors I decided to go with Hyper-V server 2012 R2.
One of the benefits of using Windows Server 2012 R2 with the hyper-v Role installed is that an administrator can use data deduplication to reduce the used storage for the VHD(X) files on the storage system.
Hyper-V server 2012 R2 natively. Reading a few articles on the internet I found a few describing how to get data deduplication on Windows 8.
