For the most part, installing Windows Server 2008 R2 on your laptop as your host operating system can work fine, however, depending on the hardware, you could run into challenges with finding drivers for things like audio, video cards, and others (usb, wireless, etc.).
A good practice would be to install a standard desktop OS (Windows 7, etc.) and use some sort of virtualization technology such as VMWare Workstation (my personal preference and well worth the money) or VirtualBox (which is free but also works well). There may be others but these tend to be fairly popular.
With a virtualization platform installed, you can spin up any number of virtual machines with different server configurations and different operating systems (Windows, Linux, UNIX, FreeBSD, etc.). One huge advantage of this approach would be that if you corrupt your virtual image you can restore to a previous state with a snapshot or just spin up a new VM. If you are doing development on your local machine there is always the chance of corrupting your laptop which would result in having to rebuild your machine. There are hybrid approaches as well where you do the actual development on your host machine and then deploy it to the VM. Lots of options and you are not locked into a particular platform as your host operating system on your laptop.
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part from my question.