You do need a powerful workstation in order to run the virtualized environment smoothly. The recommended configuration is as follows:
In addition to the system requirements for Windows Server 2008 R2 as described in the release notes, a 64-bit system with hardware-assisted virtualization enabled and data execution prevention (DEP) is required. It is also recommended to ensure that you have a clean install of x64 edition of Windows Server 2008 R2 to be able to use the Hyper-V technology.