Recently I was faced with the task of installing PerformancePoint Server 2007 to set up some labs for a customer and quickly realized there was a long list of pre-requisites including add-ins, service packs and hot fixes. Fortunately, Microsoft has created the mother-of-all virtual PC images with just about everything loaded onto it, ready to go. Let’s take a look…
Originally, Microsoft created the BI_VPC image for demonstration purposes to show off the complete Microsoft Business Intelligence solution. The image includes SQL Server 2005 SP2 including SSIS, SSAS and SSRS, Office 2007, Sharepoint Server 2007 and PerformancePoint Server 2007 all running on Windows Server 2003 R2. The Virtual PC is also a Domain Controller so Active Directory is loaded along with components like DNS, IIS and ASP.NET. It’s not recommended to load all these server roles onto one machine like this, but it does work, if slowly. I found that a minimum of 1.5GB RAM was needed for the virtual machine alone. Even then, the virtual machine took 5 minutes to boot and 5 minutes to run the initialization scripts. Patience is a word that comes to mind. If we had host machines with 4GB RAM we could throw 3GB RAM at the virtual machine for better response.
Virtual PC and similar products like VMWare and Virtual Server allow a baseline image to be created so that demonstrations or labs can be performed and then simply rolled-back using undo files. This means that all demonstrations and lab work can begin at the same point and no matter what you do you can revert to the original setup.
This is why Microsoft Learning uses Virtual PC and now it’s more powerful version Virtual Server. It’s easy to setup by simply copying the virtual hard disk (.vhd) files to the students machine and means you can do labs in any order since there is a consistent starting point for each lab. It also means that if you screw up a lab you will not affect future labs.
Now I must admit, I like the “classic” lab approach too, where a student has to build a solution from scratch. The dependencies between labs mean that if you don’t get it right first time, you have to go back and fix it, which itself has its benefits in terms of learning to troubleshoot. But it has its risks which may result in having to rebuild a student’s system, a timely task. With Virtualization, it’s just a matter of restoring the .vhd files. I like to run SQL Server classes that use both methods of learning, that way we get the best of both worlds.
But in the case of PerformancePoint Server 2007, we would have had to install several extra pieces of software, with all the required service packs and hot fixes. It would have taken a student probably a whole day of configuration labs to get to that point. And the configuration process is far from fool-proof. Far easier to download a 16GB .vhd file onto my portable hard disk and sneaker-net it to the student machines.
So thank you Microsoft for making this image available for download, it saved us a whole lot of time.
Cheers
Brian
Business Intelligence 7.1 VPC Available for download: https://blogs.technet.com/john_westworth/archive/2009/01/10/business-intelligence-7-1-vpc-available-for-download.aspx
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