At home I have my NAS setup with VPN so that I can pretty much always get back on my home network if required. This comes in handy for running virtual machines. However, since I moved to the NAS I run my virtual machines from my desktop.
The whole point of the NAS was for less power and noise though, so I don’t want the desktop on all the time. My solution was wake-on-lan (WOL) and in Windows 7 it worked great. However, over the past couple of days, I’ve upgraded to Windows 8 RTM and I couldn’t get WOL working when the machine was powered off. It worked great when the machine was asleep, but not completely off (most of the time).
Turns out the default realtek NIC drivers in Windows 8 aren’t really the best, but downloading the Windows 8 drivers from the realtek website fixed the issues.
P.S. Being able to run Hyper-V instead of Virtualbox is nice, plus you don’t loose hibernation!