Bander's Blog

I’m so excited to get the green light of publishing content about SharePoint Server 2010 Being SharePoint MVPs. we had an early access to the Office 2010 bits, to both Server and Client products but we were asked not to share any of the information, even product screenshots until Microsoft officially launches SharePoint 2010 publically in the SharePoint conference in Vegas.

You can’t imagine how much information I’m eager to share with you about SharePoint 2010! Microsoft worked really hard on making SharePoint better. Many of the annoying tasks and errors were fixed, and tons of features were added. In addition, developers have better support for developing over SharePoint with the new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint development features.

As developers, the first thing you should do is create your own sandbox, and when I say Sandbox it means that we need to create a machine that we can play with. When building Sandboxes we don’t have to stick to best practices and scalable deployments and this is what this beginner’s guide is all about. If you are looking for a scalable and stable deployment wait until SharePoint 2010 is RTM, then we can talk about best practices. In this series of posts I’ll be discussing the installation and configuration of a SharePoint 2010 virtual machine using Hyper-V. The guide is divided to parts, each part tackles a task of the virtual machine preparation process.

The guide parts are:

1. Creating and configuring the virtual machine on Hyper-V.
2. Windows Server 2008 installation and configuration for Domain Services and DNS roles.
3. SQL Server 2008 installation and configuration
4. SharePoint 2010 Server Installation & Configuration

I tried to detail things as much as I can for the beginners sake. SharePoint is now the new trend in the market and everyone is rushing to learn about it, after all it’s one of the fastest growing products in Microsoft. If you have any questions or need any help with the installation, please don’t hesitate to contact me

Let’s start with the first part of our beginners guide: Creating the Virtual Machine

Launch the Server Manager and expand the Roles branch, Hyper-V Manager Branch and right click on your server name node. Select New and then select Virtual Machine.

This will start the New Virtual Machine Wizard. Just click Next to continue.

Specify a name for your Virtual Machine. This is the name that you will find your virtual machine under in the Hyper-V Manager. Keep the default installation location and click Next.

For SharePoint 2010 you need at least 8 GBs of RAM to run it without any problems. Yes you can install it on a a 3 GBs of RAM but this will kill the performance. I will be using 10 GBs for my virtual machine. Specify the amount of RAM you’re willing to allocate for the virtual machine and click Next.

For the connection, Select the Local Area Connection – Virtual Network. If you can’t find it, cancel the wizard and go to the Device Manager and a new Legacy driver for the Microsoft Loopback adapter. Run the wizard again and the adapter you added will be there. Click Next to continue.

Specify the Virtual Hard Disk file name, location and size. Don’t worry about the size, Hyper-V won’t allocate all the specified size. The allocation will be incremental. Click Next to continue.

You can skip this step by choosing the first option. However, if you have a Windows Server 2008 x64 ISO image like me, browse to it and select it. Beware that you can’t use a 32 bit Windows Server installation because SharePoint Server 2010 is only available in 64 bit. Click Next to continue.

A summary will be displayed at the end of the wizard. Click Finish to close the wizard.

You’ll be back to the Hyper-V Manager screen. The new virtual machine will be in the Virtual Machines list. Click on Start to turn on the Virtual Machine.

In the Hyper-V Manager, virtual machines runs as processes in the background. You need to connect to them that same way we used to do with Virtual Server 2005. Click on connect to launch the virtual machine display.

You will get a new window displaying the running virtual machine we connected to. You can connect to multiple virtual machines at the same time, each will run in a different window. Don’t worry if you hit the close button on the connection window, this will only close the connection window, and the virtual machine will continue running in the background.

Check out the next post which will go over the next part of this guide.