Well as TechEd 2010 draws to a close this year in Australia, I had a great time getting away from it all and certainly experiencing a couple of firsts. For me this was one of the better TechEd’s I had been to – the sessions were a little light on, but the labs + exams made up for that big time.

So Scotty and I developed an Integration Pre Conference Training Session aimed at working out which MS Integration technology to run where – unscrambling the mess. We got a great turn out for the training in terms of numbers – we beat SharePoint 2010 dev + admin!!! :)

For all of you whom I had the pleasure of training this week – well done! I hope you enjoyed it and it was great sharing that time with you. The sun, sand, BizTalk and Azure…what could be better?? :)

As promised – here are the slides from those two days.

Keep smiling,
Mick.

Well folks, after a recent week of performance issues running a SharePoint 2010 VM image (40GB) on Virtual Box (v3.0.14 & v3.2.8) Olaf (a fellow Breezer) and I sat down and put our thinking caps on as how to improve things.

- Hyper-V wasn’t an option due to classroom setups and portability issues.

After scouring the forums, posts, blogs and other to see how to squeeze every last bit of performance from Virtual Box – I’ve come to the conclusion that current versions just don’t take full advantage of Core i7 architectures, hence they run dog slow (1 virtual cpu seems to run better than multiple).

Enter VMWare – I’m relatively new to the world of VMWare, although others on my team swear by it.

So I downloaded VMWare Player (free)

And configured a Virtual Machine (or two)

So the issue is (as I’m sure you’re well aware if you’re reading this), is that booting up Windows 2008 R2 (in my case), the native disks are SCSI and we get the dreaded Inaccessible Boot Device error (stop 0x7B).

(Back in WinXP, Win2000 & Win2003 (I think) there *used* to be a recovery option that you could repair my boot environment and it would ‘rediscover’ all the disks etc and you’d be on your way)

The aim is boot into Windows, allow it to discover, load and install the VMWare SCSI drivers (from LSI…) and then in theory you’re good to go.

After drilling down through the VMWare forums (a foreign place for me), there’s a few articles on ‘injecting drivers’ into the system, startup etc – none of these techniques worked for me (I booted to Repair window and ran regedit to ‘tweak’ some startup registry keys).

Still stuck and after many hours we noticed that CD/DVD (IDE) was an available device on the system as follows:

I thought “I wonder if I can attach the VHD as an IDE??”

After locating the VMWare VM config file – a *.VMX file I saw a couple of entries…

ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.filename = “…MicksBootIso.iso”

So I thought, let me try

ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.filename= "D:\VHDs\VHDs\SharePoint2010_v2_Child.vhd"

Saved and booted up like a bought one!

So for now…this works fantastically AND THE PERFORMANCE is at least 3-4 times faster than Virtual Box for this image. Just really snappy!

Here’s a sample file attached – enjoy.