SharePoint 2010 Development Workstation
With the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010 I have been working with my team at Burntsand to determine what the optimal development workstation (laptop) should look like. The key planning point, of course, is that SharePoint 2010 only supports 64bit instances.
We’ve tried a number of combinations of hardware and software, and we have finally solidified on using Windows 7 64bit running VMWare Workstation 6.5. For our server hosted instances we will be using Windows Server 2008 R2 with VMWare Server (mainly for consistency and portability of virtual machines).
So, why not use Hyper-V? We struggled with this question a lot. We are a Microsoft technology focused team, but ultimately the VMWare solution provided us with a more efficient and consistent development platform. In order to use Hyper-V you need to be running Windows Server 2008, which meant that we would need to install Windows Server 2008 on our laptops. While it is possible to create a Windows Server 2008 workstation, it isn’t a simple, or even 100% effective option. On top of this, the whole team loves Windows 7 and would prefer to use it over Windows Server 2008 (especially given that we could only get our Bluetooth devices to run with Windows 7 – despite all the available hacks).
The downside with Windows 7 is that the built in virtualization functionality doesn’t support 64bit guests, and it lacks a bunch of the key features we’ve come to love such as snapshots. VMWare Workstation not only supports 64bit guests, but it comes with all of the features that we’ve come to depend on for virtualized SharePoint development. Perhaps Microsoft will change this with a future release, but for now … it’s VMWare all the way.
In: Development, SharePoint · Tagged with: Hyper-V, SharePoint, Virtualization, VMWare
on February 19, 2010 at 12:00 am
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Hi Graham. As this post is older, you may have already come across the Windows 7 “boot to VHD” approach to running SP 2010. I’ve had much success with booting to a VHD on my external USB drive. The VHD boots to Windows Server 2008 and it runs SP 2010 very well. The obvious big advantage to this approach is you can keep Windows 7 on your laptop/workstation and boot to your SP 2010 environment as needed. The other big advantage is that your not running a pure virtualized environment. The VHD is configured against your native hardware using native drivers so the performance over a VMWare VM, for example, should be better (although I don’t know VMWare very well). If you want to keep your VHDs on an external USB drive then the catch is that Windows 7 doesn’t yet support booting to VHDs on USB drives. But, there is a hack/workaround that I’ve used a few times without any issues so far. Here are a couple of links that I’ve used to walk me through the setup, including the link that describes how to configure your VHD to support booting from an external USB drive.
- http://edge.technet.com/Media/Windows-7-Boot-from-VHD/
- http://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/2009/10/native-vhd-boot-windows-7-or-server-2008-r2-from-an-external-usb-drive.htm
on February 19, 2010 at 6:51 am
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Hi Steve,
Thanks for the info. I have come across the “boot to VHD” option, but haven’t tried it yet as I was hearing some mixed reviews early on. I think I’ll give it a shot and see how it fares.