Thursday, August 25, 2011

SQL Server 2008 R2 in Virtual PC

After some travails, build a Virtual PC containing SQL Server 2008 R2, for testing, learning, and demo.

Ran into some issues installing in the VPC environment What ended up working was the lowest tech approach possible.

- Capture the ISO on the guest
○ failed - apparently a known issue with the iso capture feature in VPC
○ ○ Listed as a Virtual PC issue

- Mount the iso through virtual clone drive on the host, expose that drive letter to the guest as an Optical Disk
○ Install directly
§ Failed - unknown error during SQL install
○ Copy the files from the virtual drive to local
§ Failed - "DOS errors" when copying
Sync Toy to perform an incremental copy down to the guest
§ Would lock up SyncToy and freeze the entire VPC
- Extract ISO on the host, create a mapped drive to the extracted files on the host; expose that to the guest through integration feature
○ Copy files from the host drive
§ Slow…
§ Eventually get 'Unexpected errors' the device is not connected.
○ Sync Toy to perform an incremental copy down to the guest
§ Would lock up SyncToy and freeze the entire VPC
- Burn a DVD of the ISO, load that into the host, expose that drive to the guest OS
○ Success