You heard it here first! (?)
The next major release of the All-up Virtual Machine for Business Intelligence will be made available to Microsoft Partners in the near future (No, no word on whether the general public will be able to get their hands on it, and no exact date for partners, either – “soon”.)
This particular platform is based on Windows 2008 R2 and the “November CTP” release wave of products: SQL Server 2008 R2, MOSS 2010, and Office 2010. I’ve been playing with it for just under a couple of hours, and am quite impressed. It includes some interesting wrinkles like the use of sexed-up mapping (Silverlight + Bing for some really nice visualization) and PhotoSynth. It does an excellent job of showing off the new “social” features of MOSS 2010, as well as all the good self-service BI encapsulated in PowerPivot and Report Builder 3.0
If you’re a partner, look sharp and download this sucker as soon as it’s available. You’ll need a large-ish machine to run the image on as it requires 6-8 GB of RAM and about 90 GB of HD space, but it’s worth it. I’m running it with 8 GB, 4 cores with the VHD file on a RAID 0 striped disk, and I’m really happy with performance after the initial warm up.
February 6th, 2010 at 1:29 pm
What is your host OS? What VPC emulator are you using?
I have W7 64-bit and Virutal PC will not run 64-bit VPC.
February 6th, 2010 at 5:56 pm
Regardless of the host’s bitness (you are W7 x64), VirtualPC (x86 or x64 version) will only will run a 32-bit guest. So, you’re hosed since MOSS 2010 only comes in a 64-bit flavor.
I run 2008 Server R2 w/ Desktop Experience on most of my boxes. The only machines that get Windows 7 are my laptops. I don’t see much of a difference between the two since I don’t game that much.
February 7th, 2010 at 11:03 pm
Russell, how soon the VHD will be available? I can’t wait to get my hands in it.
February 8th, 2010 at 11:19 am
Russell,
Very true. I’m considering moving to Hyper-V on my laptop in order to support 64-bit. Just got to find the time to rebuild…
In the mean time, I’ve been using VirutalBox from Sun. Pretty sad that I have to use a 3rd party emulator to run a Microsoft VPC
March 6th, 2010 at 5:30 am
Do you have the URL for the download? I log in and search, but nothing
March 6th, 2010 at 7:02 am
The VHD was made available on Monday on the partner site. It is loacted under Sales & Marketing -> Sales Demos -> Product Demos.
If you don’t have the necessary hardware to run this then you will want to look at using the online demonstration site instead http://mssalesdemos.com/.
I tried running it off a external drive and gave it 2.5 GB since I only have 4 GB of RAM and it was basically useless. You definitely need the right hardware to be able to run this and an Internet connection for some of the demos (I believe the ones with the mapping functionality using MapPoint and Virtual Earth).
March 7th, 2010 at 9:29 am
You’ll need to give at least 6 GB of RAM to this image. The main SQL instance (.\geminibi) does not have Max Memory set, so it will consume tons of RAM. I capped it at 1.8 GB and others have gone as low as 1 GB with decent results. I generally run the image with 8 GB.
If you plan on demo-ing this image, I’d also suggest you get very familiar with warming up all the reports, documents, powerpoint decks, etc. that you’ll show during the demo. If you hit one of these and they’re not cached, you will sit there spinning for *a while*.
March 7th, 2010 at 9:35 am
I tried unzipping and linking all 42 parts, but it keeps dying on me at part 29. Anyone get the image to unzip? Any idea what I might be doing wrong? Goes along fine with WinRAR and then just locks up on part 29 and freezes.
March 8th, 2010 at 10:04 am
Alan, I’ve pinged the owner to see if he’s gotten any other reports of a corrupt distro. If there is a problem & it has been corrected, I’ll post again here. You’ve tried re-downloading that file, I assume?
March 8th, 2010 at 2:02 pm
Alan it looks like this is indeed a problem. The files will be replaced as soon as they make it through our standard “web publishing protocol” – ETA unknown.