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.

Sorry, couldn’t resist!

Yesterday (or maybe it was the day before, I forget), the next rev of AllUp was released internally at Microsoft. It includes 3 new demos including a “deep dive” around PPS Planning, and new stuff for the manufacturing and hospitality sectors.  The image will expire around 12/4/2009.

The super-awesome product manager responsbile for this work of art says that it still needs to get a buy off from our legal department, so isn’t available to partners quite yet – but it will be soon!

As many of you know, Microsoft has a super-duper-fantastic (and free) VPC that you can download with all of our BI goodness pre-installed and configured. It’s called the “AllUp BI” VPC, and if you want more details, do a bit of reading here.

I use this image as a primary demo platform and have 3-4 different “hacked” versions of it on various machines I run. Because it is a totally self-contained system, this server acts as its own domain controller, which is a problem as far as PerformancePoint Server is concerned. PPS doesn’t support being installed on a DC, even though you can get it to work anyway.

I discovered yesterday that if you do install PPS on a DC, you’re going to run into problems getting service packs and hotfixes installed, too.

When attempting to deploy a particular hotfix I needed, the distro threw this error:

Failed package requirement analysis

Thanks to a couple guys here at Microsoft who reminded me that AllUp is a DC and offered a workaround, I was able to get back up and rolling quickly. Essentially, you’ll just need to run the .msp which is complaining from the command-line with a parameter that tells it to skip prerequsiste checking.

I’m my case, PPLSrv.msp /SKIPREQCHECK=1 did the trick.