Virtual Machines are essential part of life in the Commerce Server/Sharepoint space. I have been working on getting several Virtual Machines running at the same time and need them as fast as possible. I need them for some demos for Sharepoint courses that I am giving for Mindsharp/Combined Knowledge and also for some Microsoft internal Sharepoint training courses I am teaching for the Microsoft field engineers in London, Paris and Munich. Of course, I also need a fast Commerce Server 2007 virtual pc.
My first step was to get a laptop with enough memory, I chose a Lenovo 3000 N200 TY2BEGE with 3GB RAM for Euro 699,00 from www.cyberport.de First surprise, the internet price was 729,00 in spite of having the latest printed catalogue. But still seemed reasonable, about GBP 540,00 or $1070, including tax. The laptop and the memory arrived separately, but it was easy enough to install. Seemed reasonable to buy 3GB, does not seem that buying 4GB would let me address more than 3GB at present with 32 bit.
Next step, operating system. XP or Vista? 32 or 64 bit? Since my laptop came preinstalled with Vista Home Premium 32 bit, I took a deep breath and said to myself, let me work for a while with Vista, if I becomes necessary to install a new operating system and hunt down the drivers, I can always start from scratch later. I have almost all my data on USB drives, so I can work from almost any machine. My concern with Vista was that it would eat up memory that I could use more effectively in my virtual machines. But I decide to bite the bullet for now. (or in German there is an idiom about biting sour apples, but it doesn’t make any more sense!). The difficulty with drivers when I noticed a web cam on the laptop although it was not mentioned in the documentation, the reason being, there is no driver for this hardware under Vista.
Next step, which virtual machine software to use. I basically have to stick with Microsoft software rather than VMWare, since I do so much training and consulting for Microsoft. Also as a Microsoft Certified Trainer, I am supplied virtual machines prepared and tested for Virtual Server. Running several machines at once would push me in the direction Virtual Server 2005 R2. I will miss the dragging and dropping of files to the desktop feature that in Virtual pc 2007 has.
But have you ever tried to install Virtual Server under Windows Vista Home? You straight away get an error message that this is not supported. No problem, thought I and clicked through the error messages, expecting it to install anyway. But instead it aborted the installation. Googled and found contradictory info if installation was possible or not. Got the tip to try installing IIS. Here are the Windows features I switched on under IIS: (under Web management tools)IIS Management console(Under IIS 6 Management compatibility) IIS Metabase and IIS 6 configuration compatibility IIS 6 WMI compatibility(Under WWW services) Common http features (all) Application development features (all) (Under Perfomance features) Static Content compression (Under Health and Diagnostics) HTTP Logging Request Monitor Security (all)Note that there is no Windows authorization under security for Vista Home Premium. I may not have the feature names word perfect, my Vista is German. Then I allowed anonymous access to the IIS and added a password to my user account. After this I could install Virtual Server 2005 R2, (make sure of the R2) and it worked. I fiddled quite a bit with IIS authentication, but I think I set the settings back to the default, so hope I have not forgotten a step here.
Was it worth all the work? It seems to be running well. I have also tried out the VMRCplus which is a free download from here It is certainly very comfortable, but using unsupported software always seems such a temporary gain.
