Virtual SharePoint 2010? Not easy!!!!!

Unfortunately Microsoft doesn’t have a desktop virtualization story that supports 64-bit operating systems. The only Microsoft solution is to run Hyper-V which means you have to be running Windows Server 2008 x64 as the host OS. The other option is VMWare Workstation which can do 64-bit guest OS’. There are other virtualization options, but these are the two most common ones.

Andrew Connell on SharePoint 2010 VMS.

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An interesting article, but it confirms my main concern. Microsoft has made it very hard to do development with SharePoint 2010. Presently developing with WSS 3.0 is easy and can be done on most computers with Virtual PC. I do much of my work on a fairly old box running VirtualBox from Sun. Presently I do a great deal of WSS on this platform in both Server 2003 and 2008.

So if someone asks me a question or sends me a set of requirements I can follow up with a spiked out demo in SharePoint in a matter of days if not hours. So how am I going to manage with SharePoint 2010?

The answer for me is simple, I can't. I can't run a SharePoint 2010 VM on any of the machines I have, and so I can't ever confidently say I have demonstrated anything, now can I get the all important screen grabs I need to demonstrate to sales and other staff.

I know this seems like a small point, but it has me deeply worried and if it becomes a major problem in the coming years I can point to my concerns on this blog when I try to get Microsoft to make me new VP of R&D in SharePoint (LOL!)

I think the lack of pictures of directions of SharePoint 2010 that show up in a Google search is a first sign of this. If I had a working image of SharePoint 2010 I would be blogging it to death right now, but I am stuck looking at YouTube movies and reading articles.

It seems Microsoft has forgotten how user collaboration and experimentation on the beta in 2006 made SharePoint happen. I hope they soon come to their senses and provide a demo VHD that can run on a 32 machine with 2 GB of memory.