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.

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.

VMWare Fusion Bridged Network Problem

Had a problem today starting a VM that used a bridged network connection, when starting the VM I got this message;

“The network bridge device on /dev/vmnet0 is not running”

The night before I’d been using a VPN connection from the VM and paused it before shutting down, today, plugged into a different subnet and then fired up this VM and the problem occurred.

The solution I found that works is to run this command from Terminal;

sudo /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/boot.sh --restart

Thanks to another WordPresser here for the fix

I’m all Mac’d Up

I’ve had a new Macbook for a few weeks now and I’ve got to say I’m a total convert, and I’m especially loving  expose and spaces.

I’m using it for all my dev work as well, with the help of VMWare Fusion, I doubt I’ll ever buy an MS host  machine again. Most surprising was, I took a VM of my Vista laptop, dumped it on to the Mac, after running it up and getting the driver reinstallation bit over with, it seems to run quite a bit faster, the UI is definity more snappy. Having said that, obviously Vista in the VM doesn’t run Aero but even so.

Now, in our office of 10 guys, there’s only 2 who haven’t converted to Mac.

Go get a Mac, you know i makes sense.