My MOSS/SharePoint Development VM Environment

Here’s my MOSS development VM environment;

1. VMWare Server 2.0 / VMWare Fusion / VMWare Workstation (installed on local machine)
2. Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP2
3. Daemon Tools
4. IE7
5. .NET 2.0 / 3.0 / 3.5
6. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP2
7. Office 2007 (with InfoPath)
8. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
9. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
10. Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for WSS 1.3
11. VSTO Visual Studio Tools for Office
12. WSS SDK
13. SharePoint Server 2007 SDK
14. Sysprep for Windows Server 2003 SP2

Converting P2V or V2P using Windows Backup

This link describes a novel approach to converting physical machines to virtual machines and vice versa without using a Converter such as VMWare vCentre Converter.

I’m particularly interested in the the V2P solution, as, having read the offical whitepaper from VMWare about V2P, it’s a little daunting to say the least.

However I haven’t tried this yet so I can’t say exactly how well it works.

Installing the Sysprep Tool for Windows 2003 Server

It’s not that clear, at least it wasn’t to me , how to install this tool, so I’ll describe my steps here.

The version of the tool you install has to match the version of the OS you are running, so if you’re running Windows Server 2003 SP1 you need the Sysprep tool to match that version. Likewise if you’re running Windows Server 2003 SP2 you need the SP2 version of Sysprep.

Before you use the sysprep tool, you first need to install the Hotfix available from Microsoft, if you’re using Windows Server 2003.

Having done that you need to extract the deployment files from the deploy.cab file found on your W2K3 installation media/iso, or included with your SP1 or SP2 media/iso. Extract these files to something like C:\Sysprep.

You can create a sysprep.inf file manually or use the setupmgr.exe file to create the answer file interactively, and having done that you can then run sysprep itself.

Preparing a Virtual Machine as a Template using SysPrep

Here’s 2 great articles describing how to prepare a virtual machine for use as a template VM, the article discuss’s using Microsoft Virtual PC, though the content is valid if you’re using VMWare or some other virtualization product.

Here’s the first link, and here’s the second.