2010 Virtual Machines now available!
The moment you (and I) have all been waiting for….
I’m very pleased to tell you all that virtual machines are now available for both SharePoint Server 2010 and Project Server 2010.
Partners can use these virtual machines as the basis for their to-customer pre-sales demos.
Remember that the 2010 server solutions are 64-bit only, so won’t run on Virtual PC (as this only supports 32-bit). Instead you’ll need to use Hyper-V, a fantastic feature of Windows Server 2008. The setup is reasonably straightforward and should be documented in the download files; however watch this space for a full blog post on setting up Hyper-V VMs for SharePoint Server 2008 and Project Server 2008.
It’s also worth being aware of the system requirements for the 2010 servers – we recommend at least 4Gb RAM available for evaluation and 8Gb for production use. (Personally, I think at least 6Gb is necessary to run a VM). Make sure your machine is capable of running these VMs to a high standard – slow, poorly performing demos never work well!
Download links below:
SharePoint Server 2010 System Requirements
Project Server 2010 System Requirements
These VMs are a great resource for partners – they come pre-populated with data and pre-configured. They make a great starting point for building your own, custom demos to present to customers.
Obviously it’s still vital for SI partners to fully understand the full installation process for the technologies (which you can explore using the beta and evaluation copies of Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL 2008).