Given what you say about how the software you're looking into is taxing that laptop (though you should realize that laptops are
not high performance computing devices, even when they're first introduced), I would not try to run it in a VM on your server. While it's likely not to perform much worse overall (and CPU usage is likely to be lower due to the more modern
processor) I/O is always an issue with virtualization tools, and I suspect that part of your performance issue today is I/O related.
If you decide you would like to try it anyway, you should be able to use a VMWare solution, or VirtualBox, or other technology of your preference. (Note: HyperV is not available in Windows Home Server 2011; it can function as a guest, but not a host.)
I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)