Using the CRM Demo VPC on Hyper-V

Now that Hyper-V on Windows 2008 has RTM'd I thought I would pass along some steps I went through to get the Demo VPC up and running under Hyper-V.

You can download the virtual hard drive for the Demo VPC here.

After uncompressing it to a local folder - I created a differencing virtual hard drive - that way I can use the downloaded base VHD for multiple servers - I then went back and created a new Virtual Machine pointing to that VHD I just created

Once the VM is up and running - you need to replace the old Virtual Server/Virtual PC machine additions with the integration services that comes with Hyper-V.  You  don't want to bypass this step because you will lose a lot of the features wit and from past experience performance will also suffer.  Here's the steps I went through to swap out the old VM additions with the new Integration Services.

1 - Uninstall the existing machine additions - I had to do that via the Control Panel / Add Remove programs

2 - Reboot

3 - From Hyper-V admin for VM Action - Insert Integration Services (new name for additions )

4 - I had to manually go to the My Computers - Drive that was loaded with Integration Services and double click to cause it to start running

5 - It prompted to upgrade the computers HAL (Hardware abstraction layer)

6 - Reboot

7 - After reboot Integration Services installed automatically

8 - I was prompted for hidusb.sys that the detect new devices couldn't be found - since it didn't appear to have the file on the VHD , I chose to cancel and it skipped that step - I assume at this point it just means my VM won't have USB support - will investigate that later

9  - One more reboot

10 - At this point while the integration services were installed, they didn't seem right because hidusb.sys was missing -I was able to connect to a network at this point and copy that file and hidclass.sys from another windows 2003 server in our local network - and then re-ran the integration services installation

11 - after the re-run of integration services it prompted for install of new hardware - what it is trying to install is the mouse driver - which meant my mouse was useless so I had to use the keyboard to browse to windows\system32\drivers on the other server to pickup the missing driver - not sure if this was just my luck, or if that will happen to everyone - it made me appreciate the mouse!

Hopefully that will help you a little if you try to get one running under Hyper-V

In case your wondering - if you do a lot of demo's with CRM, running this setup on a demo Notebook works pretty well - in most cases I have found you can't get Sleep to work however and you might find that annoying.

I have two simple requests for the next Demo VPC in order of priority!

1  - Have Visual Studio 2008 installed instead of Visual Studio 2005

2 -  have a version of the VHD that works with Hyper-V!

Comments

[Girish Raja]

Nice one Dave. Where is the link to "Kick" this post :-) Maybe someone ought to start a "CRM Kicks" site.