I'm trying to setup a MOSS 2007 Virtual machine on my laptop. After downloading VirtualBox from Oracle which is a very good Virtualization Platform, I am going to install it. The latest version of VirtualBox is available at - http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
Top features of VirtualBox include - 64-bit OS Support, snapshots, dynamically growing VHD images and great display.
See full feature list here.
Coming to SharePoint - Why MOSS 2007 now? because there are still lots of projects based on MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0.
I find VirtualBox much better (OpenSource and Free) and easy to use than MS VPC (only 32-bit) or VMWare Workstation (paid).
The configuration that i'm trying to create will be 2GB RAM, 20GB Dynamic VHD, Windows 2003 Standard to run MOSS 2007 SP2.
So here's how it's done -
1. Install Oracle Sun VirtualBox - very easy and nothing much to talk about.
2. Fire-up VirtualBox and click on the "New" button in the toolbar.
3. The "New VM Wizard will start"
4. Choose the name of the VM and OS type. A wide range of 32 and 64 bit flavors of Windows are supported (apart from others). I am choosing Windows 2003 32-bit to install MOSS 2007.
5. Allocate Memory for the VM. In my case it's 2GB out of a total of 6GB.
6. Create a new VHD (Virtual Hard Disk). The good thing about VirtualBox is that it supports both expanding and fixed size VHD images. Choosing dynamically growing storage will help you save space on your disk.
Following this the VHD sub-wizard will launch.
7. Click on next
8. Choose "Dynamically expanding storage" and then the size of the VHD -
9. Choose the location where you'd like to store the VHD image. Ideally it should be on an external HDD that
connects to the desktop/laptop via eSATA or a separate internal HDD. I have neither so the image goes
into my regular HDD.
and then press "Finish" in the next screen.
Well that's all there is to it. The VM is ready for OS installation. VirtualBox then shows
the summary of the VM. To power on the VM, press the "Start ->" button.
What follows next are the usual OS installation steps. Once you have installed the OS,
SharePoint can be installed.
I'm not enlisting all those steps here so here are some screenshots of that sequence.
Now it boots up from the DVD-ROM
Windows 2003 Setup screen -
After install is done i start Task manager to have a peek at the performance. It has by default allocated only one virtual processor. You can change this to multiple depending on your hardware. Allocating too many virtual processors will slow down your computer.
After base installation on Windows 2003, the VHD size is just 1.6GB which can be easily copied on to a Pen Drive.
At this point it is a good idea to take your first snapshot of the VM. I went on to install SharePoint pre-requisites and MOSS 2007 Enterprise on top of this setup and now have a MOSS 2007 VM on Oracle VirtualBox.
The performance is very good - VB fires up in just under 5 seconds and you have SharePoint up and running!
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