The first time I started developing Performance Point solutions inside of SharePoint 2010 for a client I knew that to get beyond proficient and into the realm of expert I was going to have to spend a lot of my own time creating reports, KPIs, scorecards and dashboards. To do that I needed an SharePoint environment to call my own. I tried and successfully installed SharePoint 2010 on my laptop running Windows 7 using the steps outlined here. But it was slow going, I only have 3GB of RAM on my laptop. Since I was traveling so much for work it just had to do.
Then I was asked to tech edit SharePoint Business Intelligence 24 Hour Trainer and suddenly my laptop just wasn’t going to cut it anymore. For one thing I was going to have to uninstall and reinstall a couple of times just to properly edit the book. For another I have a more powerful machine at home (quad core and up to 8GB of RAM) and I wanted to install Windows Server 2008 R2 on it. But its my family’s computer and was still running Vista and I didn’t want to wipe all the programs I had installed on it.
While talking about my problem with Marc Stacey (@MarkGStacey ) suggested that I create a virtual Hard Disk for setting up the Windows Server 2008R2 environment. Even though I trust Marks opinion I wanted to understand a little more before I ran off and tried to implement a vhd. The first thing I wanted to know is what are the advantages of using a vhd? The most significant advantage in my opinion is not having to edit your current partitions. Another is that you are not limited on the number of vhd files on your computer except to the extent of the amount of storage you have. You can also create incremental vhd files having one based on another.
So now that I had a possible solution it was time to try and implement it. So next time I’ll go over the steps I took to set up the vhd. Until next time, GO GIANTS
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