GSR Solutions Blog

I am having to rebuild Windows 7 Beta from scratch under VMware Fusion. Not sure what happened actually but I had installed Office 2007 Enterprise, Vizio 2007, SharePoint Designer 2007 and Visual Studio 2008. This in it self was not problematic.

I then configured outlook to get my work email. Everything was OK until I took Outlook 2007 into Unity mode. At first all was well. I was able to archive and send and receive mail.

I put my Mac to sleep and went to the gym for lunch. When I came back Outlook was no longer located in my OSX dock. I took the VM out of Unity Mode and discovered that the VM had entered stand by mode. SO when I went to “un-pause” te Win7 VM it did nothing. This continued to the point where nothing I did would bring it back.

So now I am reinstalling the whole mess.

On a positive note my Win2k3 server VM is running fine but I have not used unity mode on it for any of the applications.

Robert Business, VIrtualization Unity Mode, VIrtualization, VMware Fusion, Windows 7

OK I know the title maybe a bit misleading for some but you can have your cake and eat it too as long as you are willing to run Windows Server virtually.

Why am I doing this?

In preparation for some training on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, I have deployed WSS 3.0 on VMware Fusion. I know, I know blasphemy. SharePoint running on a Macintosh!

I have been fortunate in my career to have been able to work with a plethora of hardware and Operating Systems. All of them have their strong and week points. I have always felt more productive on the Macintosh platform and find myself fortunate user of a newish MacBook Pro 15.4″ model with 4GB of RAM.

I will be blogging about how I deployed WSS, tricks to simplify development and pit falls to avoid.

So with this said if you want to follow along you will need to understand the WSS architecture that I am deploying virtually.

The architecture:

There are three common SharePoint architectures: single server configuration, medium server farm and the high availability server farm. Since my WSS virtual machine is meant for development I chose to set up a single server farm configuration. More on why later. If you are interested in the planning and architecture of WSS Farms check this link. If you just want the quick run down on WSS Architecture  check out Becky Lash’s blog post – Basics of WSS 3.0 architecture: My personal notes .

Download the Software:

So if you are going to follow along you will need to download and install the following before we can begin our WSS 3.0 single server configuration.
VMware Fusion 2.0 (Try before you buy!)
MacFUSE
NTFS-3g read write driver

Note on installing VMware Fusion 2.0: while you will be able to do this on a machine with 2 GB RAM I highly suggest you upgrade your machine to 4 GB of RAM.

Installing the Software:

A note before installing anything: You have backed up files that you can’t loose right? You are able to troubleshoot OS X and Windows Server installations right? Why do I ask? Because I am paid to do this for a living and will not be supporting this installation for free.

Installing MaxFUSE:

• Down load the latest OSX dmg here
• Double click the MacFUSE-2.0.x.dmg
• Double click the MacFUSE 2.0 drive icon
• Double click the MacFUSE.pkg (the installer application)
• Click OK button until you get to a screen that says Install Succeeded.

Installing the NTFS-3g driver

Installing VMware

Wrapping it up:

OK now you are ready to install pretty much any modern operating system in VMware Fusion. In my next post in this series I will cover the installation of Windows Server 2003 and what you need to do to prepare for your WSS installation.

Until then have a great week and don’t be afraid to try something new.

Robert Grissom
GSRsolutions.com

Robert SharePoint osx, SharePoint, vitulization, vmware, wss

Just installed Wordpress on my ipod touch.

This is my 3rd post using it. The first post the save button disapeared, weird. The second post was just a test and worked fine. I fully expect that this app will work fine. I will post on my blog from time to time about using and or developing for wordpress. Now if Apple would jus add copy and paste to the ipod touch!

Robert Business

The GSR Solutions web site and blog are now live! I have chosen to build the GSR Solutions web site in static HTML and CSS. I have also chosen WordPress for the blog software. This is the first update to the site in some time. I am excited to see how it is received. If you have any comments or suggestions leave here on the blog please. 

I will be posting announcements via the GSR Solutions blog and Twitter so tune in to learn more.

I will be working on the TeezFactory.com and Main Street Velo web sites next. Both will be using the Open Source Drupal Content Management System.

Robert Business blog, drupal, Web Site, word press