Building a Virtual CRM 2011 Server for Demos and Development

David Yack has done a great video tutorial on building a virtual server for CRM 2011 to use in development or for demos. Girish Raja posted it to his blog on MSDN. Take a look.

Nice work, David!

New Article on the Microsoft CRM Team Blog

I have a new article on the Microsoft CRM Team Blog today with some tips on building a virtual development server for CRM using Windows Server 2008 and SQL 2008. Check it out!

New Demonstration VPC for CRM 4.0

Microsoft has released a new demonstration VPC image for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. The image is built using SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, and is available on PartnerSource. It is set to expire in August 2010. Happy demo'ing!

Expand A Virtual Hard Disk

I recently created a new virtual server for development purposes, and made the newbie mistake of leaving the maximum hard drive size set to 16GB. Even though I set it up to be a dynamically expanding hard disk, it was only after I installed Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, CRM, SharePoint, Office, Visual Studio and 25 other tools, that I realized I was about to run out of space on my system drive. As a Microsoft fan, I use Virtual PC 2007, which in this case meant that my toolset was a little limited in managing my VPC images.

After doing a bit of searching, I came across numerous posts that had a lot of cumbersome ways to expand the system partition on a virtual machine. Laziness being the mother of invention, I was determined to find a simpler way. And I am glad to report that not only did I find an easy way, but it was also totally free. Here's what I did:

1) Download and install VMWare's VCenter Converter.

2) Convert my VHD to a VMWare hard drive. VMWare Converter lets you specify a new size for the new hard drive. I set it to 40GB. The conversion took about 15 minutes, and the result was a 14GB vmdk hard drive file. (No need to boot it up in VMWare).

3) Downloaded and install the VMDK2VHD utility - also free - from http://vmtoolkit.com/files/folders/converters/entry8.aspx.

4) Launched the VMDK2VHD and pointed it at the file I had just created with VM's Converter.

About 40 minutes later I had a new VHD file. I pointed my original VMC file to use this new VHD file, started it up, kept my fingers crossed, and...voila! I now have a bunch of free space on my image!

New VPC Image Is Finally Available!

It's out! Finally! I know the guys at Microsoft have been hard at work on this new CRM 3.0 Virtual PC image. This much anticipated VPC image is a great tool for demo and development purposes, and expires in November 2008. Thanks for the hard work guys!
It can be downloaded here.

New CRM VPC Image Just Days Away

Menno is reporting on his blog that the new VPC image he has been working on for CRM 3.0 will be available soon. The VPC image is a virtual server pre-installed with CRM and some cool customizations. It's a great tool for demonstrations to prospective clients (it can be installed on a laptop inside Virtual Server or Virtual PC) - and it's also a great tool for testing and development.

A side note about this new VPC: Menno kindly incorporated one of my own customizations as detailed in my article on the CRM Team blog on MSDN. This customization will let you browse folders and file directories from within an iframe on the CRM account form. It uses a SharePoint webpart to do this. We also added some code so that if there is no associated folder for the record already on the server, it will create one for you! So download and install the VPC when it's available to get the full scoop on this cool tool (I call it filebrowser - very creative, huh?). I'll post here when the new image is ready to download.