I have a WIN7 Ultimate laptop that has MS Virtual PC loaded on it. I have XP in the VM. The WIN7 native machine holds all of my day to day work.
I need to add a VM that will be WIN2008R2 64bit to demo SharePoint and OE10.2 or OE11. Virtual PC only allows 32 bit environments.
I am looking for advice on how to add the new 64 bit VM while keeping my personal world in place and out of harms way. I do not think I want a solution that requires a hypervisor layer but would be willing to get convinced otherwise.
I have looked that the VMWare site and am overwhelmed by my choices. I am a MSDN Premium subscriber so I have access to all the MS offerings. I would like to avoid adding more licensing costs but would pay for a simple and elegant solution.
I'd appreciate any real world experince and feedback.
Is there a better PSDN forum for this sort of question?
Thanks,
Bob Brennan
Is this for your PUG Challenge presentation? How about contacting the organizers and ask them if they can get special terms for an Progress Arcada VM for that purpose? However I am not 100% sure if you can install Sharepoint on an Arcade image.
Next option might be an Office 365 Sharepoint setup.
If you go for an installed VM, Oracle's VirtualBox is a viable option and can be installed side by side with your existing Virtual PC: https://www.virtualbox.org/
VMware has a free VMware Server product: http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/datacenter_downloads/vmware_server/2_0
If you have a VMware Server or VMware workstation product somewhere availalble you can use that to build a VMware and run that on your laptop in the free VMware player: http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_player/4_0
You'll just have to make sure that you are using a compatible virtual hardware version.
VMware Server is pretty limiting, and as far as I know it is no longer being developed. If you're looking for a free and easy-to-use solution, I think VirtualBox is a better choice. You won't be limited on the vCPUs and RAM you can allocate. Give it a try, you should find it meets your needs.
Thanks Rob and Mike. I am going to look at VirtualBox first. I appreciate the suggestions. That looks the most promising so far and seems to be exactly what I had in mind.
Mike, I will be using this setup for the PUG Challenge talks. It is also a test bed for some other R&D that I would like to work on over the next few months. That includes while seated on a plane so the Cloud is not really an option just yet.
However, your Arcade reference got me to thinking. As a MSDN Premium subscriber, I also have access to Azure. Either cloud offering (Arcade, Azure) might be an option moving forward. I will dig into both before we get to the Americas Challenge.
Bob