SharePoint 2010: Virtual Machine

It seems SharePoint 2010 will only support 64-bit . That means, right now, Virtual PC is no use as it only supports 32-bit hosts.  That’s a pain for any roaming developer/demonstrator who needs to stick SharePoint on their (already expensive) laptops. Microsoft loyalists must now consider the enemy. 

The question is which virtualisation technology to use. The post below gives a good summary of our new predicament. I’ve chosen to use Sun Virtual Box as it’s totally free and is worth a go.

• Creating 64 bit virtual machines: http://thingsthatshouldbeeasy.blogspot.com/2009/07/creating-64-bit-virtual-machines.html
• Virtual Box: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

If Virtual Box turns out to be even slightly better than VPC, then it’s goodbye VPC.

VM: VPC: Sluggish

Sluggish behaviour on my Virtual Machine almost drove me mad. I was running a dual core, 2.8 Ghz, 4GB laptop with 2 disk drives on Windows 7 and still the VM was unresponsive and choppy.

To pull me back from certain insanity I found this tip on Ben Armstrong’s blog.

Add this:
<enable_idle_thread type="boolean">true</enable_idle_thread>

to your Virtual PC Options.xml file which should be located somewhere near:
%appdata%\Microsoft\Virtual PC\options.xml
or
%appdata%\Microsoft\options.xml
or
C:\Users\[Your username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Virtual PC

My Options.xml ended up looking a bit like this:


<virtual_machines>
<power>
<mm_timer_duration type="integer">10</mm_timer_duration>
</power>
<enable_idle_thread type="boolean">true</enable_idle_thread>
</virtual_machines>


This solved the problem for me but it does make the fan whir somewhat.

Update: Couldn’t stand the whirring fan so decided to see if a BIOS update would help. It seemed to.