So I’ve been looking at how to get a development VM sorted for SharePoint 2010. Surely it’s straightforward you ask? Unfortunately no. SharePoint 2010 is all about the 64’s, namely

SharePoint Server 2010

• will be 64-bit only.
• will require 64-bit Windows Server 2008 or 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2. ll
• will require 64-bit SQL Server 2008 or 64-bit SQL Server 2005.

Hmm. This causes a problem as I (and a lot of others) currently develop on 32bit machines using either VMware or Virtual PC under a number of OS’s, such as XP, Vista etc.

I decided to try and get a base Windows 2008 RC2 VM setup with a beta of Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008, 64bit to see how it hangs together.

VMWare Server
First off I tried VMWare Server 2.0, which is free from the VM site. All I needed to do was install it on my existing machine (a laptop, 3GB memory) and set about creating my new VM. Thing is, apparently not all host machines are capable of running it. VMWare provide a little utility that you can use to determine if your machine can support 64 bit. You can find it here:

http://www.vmware.com/download/ws/drivers_tools.html

So my laptop fortunately passed with flying colours. Next step was to install the Win2k8 R2 OS, which as it happens was painless enough. Be sure to install the VM additions to improve performance.

Speaking of which, I immediately noticed that mouse updates and screen refreshes aren’t what I’m used to with Virtual PC. Lag is definitely noticeable. It actually got worse when SQL 2008 and VS 2010 were installed, with the VM constantly sitting at 100% CPU Usage. I’ve been hitting news groups and forums to determine what I can to to remedy this but unfortunately information is scarce. I’ve actually tried this VM on both my laptop and home PC (Quad Core, 3GB ram) and it still runs very poorly.

Windows 7

Windows 7 is the new contender and it comes with it’s own variant of Virtual PC, that supports and XP mode for older applications. Thing is, Windows 7 Ultimate doesn’t support Windows 2008 RC2 64bit as a guest operating system!  That’s that then!

Virtual Server 2005 on Windows 7

So what about running Virtual Server 2005, another of Microsoft’s VM technologies. on Windows 7

Possibly onto a winner here, I thought… but I was wrong. If you look at this post:

http://aboutdev.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/virtual-server-2005-and-windows-7/

you’ll see that Windows 7 intentionally blocks Virtual Server 2005 from running, with what is known as a ‘hard block’, basically to quote Microsoft:

Hard Block:

The software must exhibit the following behaviour to qualify for a hard block:

1. The OS is rendered unusable and unrecoverable (includes bug check).
2. The hard block is preferable to the alternative user experience, including:

   a. The OS would be left partially functional, and no in-context guidance can be given to the user, and the hard block can provide steps to remedy the problem.

   b. An application would be left unusable and unrecoverable (can’t be repaired by uninstall or upgrade). This should be an extremely rare case, since recovering from an application installation should be possible through install/uninstall software. The vendor would need to prove that that is not an option.

I’ve found a few more posts whereby you can run the following to get Virtual Server 2005 to work on Windows 7 but it’s not supported:

First you should block PCA. I did that by the following way: In the Group Policy go to the Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Application Compatibility\ and enable all of the Turn off xxx entries. I think if you enable only the "Turn off Application Compatibility Engine" it would be enough but I wanted to be sure and enabled everything, later we are going to restore the original settings. Then go to the Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Troubleshooting and Diagnostics\Application Compatibility Diagnostics\ area and disable all of the entries so that we don’t come across any DCOM or driver related error.

IIS have to be prepared as well. Requirements are same as in Vista take a look at this link http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2006/10/10/Installing-Virtual-Server-2005-R2-on-Vista-RC1-_2F00_-RC2.aspx you can find the correct settings.
Restart your computer and then you are ready to install the Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. Afterwards Virtual Server (VS) should be running and you can check it by Virtual Server Administration Website.

Next restore all settings what you changed in Group Policy and restart your computer. Unfortunately Application Compatibility Engine will detect Virtual server services and block that again. So you have to go to the Virtual Server directory (Usually C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual Server\) and rename the vssrvc.exe to something else (example: vssrvc_newname.exe). Open the registry editor and replace all entry which contains "vssrvc.exe" to vssrvc_newname.exe (path, DCOM object details, etc)
Finally restart your computer and enjoy Virtual server 2005 at Windows 7 RC

So what’s the result then?

Not much really I’m afraid. At this point the only options are:

• Wait for VMWare to resolve performance issues with VMWare Server & Windows 2008
• Run Windows 2008 natively on my laptop and use Hyper-V to run guest OS’s for development. A very costly option I might add.
• Hope that a patch is released for Windows 7, or Windows 7 Virtual PC to support Windows 2008 guests.

Truthfully I hope it’s the latter as Windows 7 is pretty cool to use.