itaysk

There’s seems to be a little issue that was not getting a lot of attention with all the hype around SharePoint 2010, and that is - virtualization support.

As a SharePoint consultant, I travel a lot, and having a SharePoint machine available where ever I’m at is a minimum requirement.
Up until now, I had a virtual environment of MOSS running on my (quite powerful) laptop. I ran it on Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (now Microsoft Windows Virtual PC).

The only problem with that is that Microsoft Virtual PC does not support 64bit running as guest. And that could be quite a problem, now that SharePoint 2010 requires 64bit machines.

What will we do?

As I see it, we have these options:

• Run the SharePoint server on a remote machine, and remote control it when necessary. – This method is a bit problematic if you don’t always have a good internet connection available.
• Use Hyper-V virtualization technology, that DOES supports 64bit guests. Not an option for me because it requires win 2008 server OS installed on my laptop.
• Use non-Microsoft virtualization technologies that supports 64bit guests (such as VMWare). That is probably what I am going to do..

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think the SharePoint team had anything to to with it, deciding to go 64bit only. But I do think It’s very unfortunate that Microsoft chose this strategy with VPC, because it immediately drops a big part of it market share (basically everyone that run some kind of modern server platform as guest)

Well.. I’m off to install VM-Ware, what about you?