SharePoint 2010 Speed, and Boot to VHD

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Been pouring through all the new goodies in SharePoint 2010 like a kid opening his first Christmas present -
So much fun, so little time.

A few people have made the comment that SharePoint 2010 Public Beta runs pretty slowly for demo’s – here’re a few suggestions I’ve noticed that helps for me:

  1. You need more than 2GB of RAM for SharePoint on your demo machine. 
  2. Ideally, a generous amount of hard drive space

My setup has worked pretty well for me:

  1. Host is Win7 x64
  2. Created a VHD (virtual hard drive) with about 50GB allocated space. 
  3. Installed Windows 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008, SharePoint 2010 public beta, Office Web Apps, and Office 2010 client apps.
  4. Configure the VHD as a bootable device (new in Win7)
  5. On start of laptop, I get to choose to boot into Windows 2008 / SharePoint 2010 directly, which allocates all the laptop’s resources to the VM
  6. Oh – grab the ATI display drivers for DELL (see my previous post) to make sure Windows 2008 R2 can display via an external projector – ahead of the presentation.  (I nearly had a panic attack but got it all sorted before I had to go on stage).

The best part is when we move on from the public beta, I’ll just copy a new VHD over the same directory under Win7, then it’s all set.