Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Demo VM Tips & Tricks

Table of Contents

The Hyper-V image is now available publically here (this is new SP2010RTM VM released on 8-May-2010).

It is 15 x 700Mb files...so make sure you've got the bandwidth

It is also a Hyper-V image, but remember that you can convert Hyper-V images to VMWare Workstation and Sun Virtual Box relatively easily.

The benefit here is that everything is setup for you and you can run through the development hands on labs on MSDN.

Could not find details of the administrator password ANYWHERE...it's 'pass@word1' .  VM is configured with a US keyboard so make sure you know where the @ is.

Convert the image

If you've got no where to spin up the Hyper-V image, you can also use WinImage or StarWind.
WinImage allows you to convert the VHD from the bare file without having to boot the VM up using Hyper-V. NOTE: VMWare Converter does not support VHD's files like this only Virtual PC images, but see below under 'Conversion to vmdk' for instructions with Win 7 (import into Virtual PC to create vmc file needed by VMWare Converter).

HyperV Services

If you have converted the image and are running in VMWare or Sun Virtual Box ensure that you disable the Hyper-V Windows Services as pictured below and then stop these services:

IP settings

When you convert from the VHD you will also find that your IP settings will be incorrect. What I did to get around this was add some host entries for the urls that I want to hit on that server e.g. intranet.contoso.com and have them pointing at 127.0.0.1 (localhost). This worked for me. I'm sure there is a more elegant solution?

Virtualisation Options

Boot to VHD Options

@SharePointAlex has a great article on how to do this!

VMWare

Conversion to vmdk

Use WinImage to convert the VHD to a VMDK file. Make sure you select 'Dynamic disk' as a fixed disk comes out at around 120Gb and you get really poor performance. Then create a new VM in VMWare Workstation and select 'add an existing disk' and pick your new vmdk file.

If you use VMWare Converter you need a .vmc file per image in order to convert it. On Windows 7 you can start Virtual PC and import the .vhd file. This will create a .vmc file for the image. Once you start VMWare Converter you can now load up the newly created .vmc file and start the conversion. Note, although the Virtual Machine is 64-bit, Virtual PC will still create you a .vmc which is all VMWare Convert needs

VMWare Tools

To ensure all the drivers work correctly in the environment, make sure you install the VMWare Tools.

Sun VirtualBox

Follow Rolly Perreaux's guide where he describes converting a Microsoft provided Project Server 2010 image from Hyper-V to VirtualBox.
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Comments (11)

 

  1. Feb 03, 2010

    paul Keijzers says:

    Hi Jeremy, Did you experiment with all 3 like hyperv vmware sun.. And what did...

    Hi Jeremy,

    Did you experiment with all 3 like hyperv vmware sun..

    And what did you think performend best of the 3.

    1. Feb 03, 2010

      Jeremy Thake says:

      HA HA...I see where this is going..."turf war". I have not tried Sun Virtual Bo...

      HA HA...I see where this is going..."turf war".

      I have not tried Sun Virtual Box. It'd be interesting to run all three on the same machine as a test definately. I could install Virtual Box and give those two a bench mark. Hyper-V would require me going back to base of Win Server 2008 R2 which I don't want to do at this stage.

      Maybe we can think of a script to run on each and see how long it takes.

  2. Feb 26, 2010

    Ayman El-Hattab says:

    This was really useful, Thanks Jeremy :)

    This was really useful, Thanks Jeremy :)

  3. Mar 07

    cakl says:

    very very useful!!!! but 1 question to "ip settings": can you e...

    very very useful!!!!

    but 1 question to "ip settings": can you explain me which changes you have done? when I start the IE it cant display intranet.contoso.com! I also tried to restart the IIS Server and this "wam-up-batch" on the desktop...

    thanks a lot in advance!!!

    cakl

  4. Mar 08

    Mike Mormando says:

    On the VirtualBox issues, I recently had just the same sort of problems just try...

    On the VirtualBox issues, I recently had just the same sort of problems just trying to convert from VMWare to VirtualBox, after going through their support forums it appears most VM hosts expect a certain video interface, I think it was AGP, but VirtualBox supports PCI only, and in fact crashes in the presence of the basic AGP drivers. Something along those lines, I spent an afternoon trying to get it to work then wound up just using VMWare player.

  5. Mar 31

    Ricardo Wilkins says:

    Regarding getting VirtualBox to work, I used the following techniques, tho I'm n...

    Regarding getting VirtualBox to work, I used the following techniques, tho I'm not sure which of them were the most influential in getting it running - one or all of the steps might do the trick:

    • Gave 2 processors to the VM, and 3.5 Gigs of RAM
    • followed some instructions from this website
    • Used the tips in the above post re: disabling Hyper-V and changing the host file

    All now appears to be well... so far. :)

  6. May 31

    paul Keijzers says:

    Hi Jeremy, I also made a poll on linkedin which shows a lot of people are using...

    Hi Jeremy,

    I also made a poll on linkedin which shows a lot of people are using VMware.

    Go check it out here http://polls.linkedin.com/p/86514/rudte

    ---------

    Paul Keijzers

    @KbWorks

  7. May 31

    Daniel Reed says:

    I recently tried building SharePoint 2010 VMs in Hyper-V, VMWare and Virtua...

    I recently tried building SharePoint 2010 VMs in Hyper-V, VMWare and VirtualBox. I use an i7-920 with 12GB RAM, so should get decent performance out of virtualisation. I used identical installation steps on all machines.

    Hyper V was great, but I use Win7 at home, so can't use that. Onto the next 2...

    VirtualBox's performance was awful. Not really sure why. It was great up until I installed Sharepoint itself. The configuration screens took a long time, and it took almost a minute to attach to the IIS worker process when debugging. If anyone has had better experiences, let me know. Occasionally it would freeze for 20 seconds at a time, and CPU usage would be very high. I eventually gave the VM all the processors I could and all the RAM I could reasonably afford to allocate, but no improvement.

    I then switched to VMWare and got much better performance with less resources. I got much less CPU usage and no freezes to speak of. Not to mention the fact that VMWare supports my dual monitors!

  8. Jun 16

    Manish says:

    Hi Everybody Thanks for this useful post. I am trying to use SharePoint 2010 VH...

    Hi Everybody

    Thanks for this useful post. I am trying to use SharePoint 2010 VHD on Virtual Box 3.2.4 version and after following the steps http://rperreaux.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!5D7BD18D324CBEEF!1043.entry I am getting a blue screen. Tried all the available options but I am not able to solve this. My host system is Win 7 Home Premium (64 Bit). Can you please suggest any alternatives.

    Thanks

    Manish

    http://manish-sharepoint.blogspot.com/

  9. Jun 29

    Kevin H says:

    Manish,  I had the same problem and with some more research, it seemed that...

    Manish,  I had the same problem and with some more research, it seemed that the Blue Screen was caused when using SATA as the storage controller for the VHD.  I switched the VHD to use the IDE controller and everything booted just fine. Hope this helps.

  10. Aug 11

    Tristan says:

    Gday, thanks for the heads up on converting the Demo image. Has anyone tri...

    Gday, thanks for the heads up on converting the Demo image.

    Has anyone tried to relicence the VM ? I have tried MSDN/Technet licences but they fail for Office 2010 although I can use MSDN licencing for Windows Server 2008 R2

    Thanks for any help

    edit: found out that the version of office is not technet software, reinstalled the software but still cannot licence with technet licencing weird

    Resolved: Another uninstall and reinstall fixed it and allowed me to enter technet licencing


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