The "Virtual" Development Environment
Sep
3
Written by:
9/3/2010 2:40 PM
I received some excellent advice from the gang at the Sharepoint LinkedIN group this week regarding the setup of a virtual development environment. One of my areas of focus has been Sharepoint development. You might recall that Sharepoint 2010 was released earlier this year, which is great news! However, for those of us running 32bit test servers, it wasn't such great news because the new version of Sharepoint will only run on x64 machines.
I had a few options that involved some monetary or time investment:
- Install Sharepoint 2010 on my Windows 7 desktop. It's a x64 system and complies with the minimum requirements of Sharepoint. The downside is that it clutters up the system with extra overhead and the application is not leveraging the full capabilities of a server.
- Upgrade my x86 test server. This old Dell has been a trooper. It runs Windows Server 2003 and has been used as a test environment for my client projects. I used it to do some web part work in MOSS 2007. Clients can access it using LogMeIn to review their project(s). However, I don't really want to invest in upgrading the processor to x64 and all the associated hardware involved.
- Virtualize!! This is what seems to be the best solution for me. I used Oracle's VirtualBox to create a virtual environment on my x64 desktop. I installed Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2010 and we're now ready to rock with Sharepoint 2010. Time cost was a few hours. Monetary cost = $0!
A word of caution if you use VirtualBox: The default storage size of 20gb is going to burn up very quickly. In fact, I didn't have enough storage space to fully-install SQL Server and all options. Be sure to bump up the storage when creating the Virtual Image so that you can have all the room needed to setup your development environment.
This is, by no means, the only solution! I'd like to learn from my readers and fellow developers how they have utilized virtualization to create their development environemtn. Be sure to share your "Gotchas" too.