I was running Vista on my Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz with 3 GB ram desktop at home for a while, but the toy did not always performed as I wanted. Especially when working on my SharePoint virtual machines. The typical issue. I was thinking of just adding more memory, but considering it was a 32 bit installation adding memory didn't seem to be working for me. Looking around the net I discovered that some guys out there where using Windows 2008 64 bit on their machines as native OS. After some further digging I discover something astonishing! You can install Windows 2008 and just by enabling some specific features you get everything you had on your Vista including the Aero theme :-) Nothing astonishing yet ... taking a look at performance Windows 2008 Vista Enabled is more stable and performing better then the real thing. I really had to see this for myself so I decided to install Windows 2008 64 bit on my desktop! Here's the story.
Inserted the DVD and let's boot! The setup worked like a charm. After a half hour Windows 2008 was running on my machine without having to install drivers or nothing. First thing to look at was the initial footprint. Good thing that I was sitting down. The initial footprint was just under 300MB!!!Sweat! This was looking very promising! Next was to start enabling everything so I would end up with a Vista look and feel. Following these 2 great posts:
I ended up with a Windows 2008 setup with all Vista features and my footprint hardly went up! Really, this is really by far the most stable windows setup I have ever encountered! I am still wondering as to how it is possible that Vista performance is so low compared to a Windows 2008 system. Of course it's a server and it's supposed to perform better than a desktop OS, but still... it seems that Windows 2008 has a different core then Vista which results in better performance.
So now that I got the OS running it was time to start thinking SharePoint! Seeing that I had lots of memory left I started enabling roles and features:
- Application Server
- Domain Controller
- DNS (not DC without DNS)
- Hyper-V
All this running my footprint was 1.5 GB! Let's push on and start installing SQL 2008, VSTS2008 and SharePoint 2007. All went fine. Nothing strange to mention. So now I got a SharePoint farm running on my machine without any virtualization! Footprint? 1.97 GB! Really this is like a dream come true. Final step was to add a WFE to my farm using Hyper-V. All the basic Hyper-V steps, which is pretty much the same steps as using Virtual PC, resulted in having another Windows 2008 running in my domain and a fresh WFE added to my farm! This just keeps getting better and better. Footprint? 2.97 GB! Ok... I was getting to the limit of my machine, but it was all still running pretty good!
As I was now running a 64bit systems there are no more limits on my available memory. Oh yeah! After a trip to the shops, I replaced the original 3GB with 8GB 800MHz DDR2 memory... This really rocks!
Conclusion:
- Windows 2008 is by far the most stable and best performing OS Microsoft ever released. Well done chaps! If only Vista could meet up to the specs...
- Hyper-V really rocks!
- The memory consumption is really low enabling you to have an entire SharePoint farm running on your system without any need for virtualization
- I can now have full blown SharePoint farm when I start with virtualization with different servers in the farm without compromising performance.
- This kind of setup should now be considered as the new standard for any SharePoint development environment as it comes really close to a enterprise environment and offers lot's of possibilities to test products surrounding SharePoint like PerformancePoint, Communicator Server and so on..
- The sky is the limit.
In following post I will keep you posted on any strange things I encounter as I add tools and software to my sweet machine
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