Dynamics AX 2009 New VM - November release

Couple of days back I tried to open my existing Dynamics AX VM to find that it expired on Nov 15.

Lachlan has put up a blog post about the new VM's which Microsoft has released here in this link http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lcash/archive/2010/11/03/announcement-of-microsoft-dynamics-ax-2009-demonstration-vm-november-2010-refresh.aspx

VM OS now comes in 3 flavors

a. Hyper-V with Windows Server 2008
b. VPC 2007 with Windows Server 2008
c. VPC 2007 with Windows Server 2003

You can jump to PartnerSource by clicking these links

a. https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/deployment/documentation/howtoarticles/MSDYAX2009_DemoToolkit_Refresh4

b.
https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/documentation/setupguides/MSDYAX2009_DemoToolKit_Refresh3_5

c.
https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/documentation/setupguides/MSDYAX2009_DemoToolKit_Refresh3

My Experience about Configuring Dynamics AX 2009 VM on Hyper-V

Hi there, Just wanted to share my recent experience about configuring Hyper-V and creating a new VM to run Dynamics AX on it. This was done for one of our DEV Environments.
Q What is Hyper-V/Virtualization technology?
A In simple terms, Virtualization enables multiple Operating Systems to run concurrently on single machine. Some of the key benefits which virtualization provides -

• Server Consolidation
• Consolidation of DEV and TEST Environments
• Legacy applications re-hosting... etc

Coming to Hyper-V, it's a feature of Windows Server 2008 (x64 bit) provided by Microsoft for enabling scalable, reliable and highly available virtualization platform.

To know more about Hyper-V and Virtualization, I would recommend you to go through the below links
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-faq.aspx
http://www.hyper-green.com/?CR_TC=9OSUHTJ8BB2INOT

Ok, now let me quickly jump to the configuration and setting up of Hyper-V. One of the key pre-requisite is to have a Windows Server 2008 (x64-bit) OS running and configure your BIOS to enable virtualization - I learned this the hard way out :-), had to spend some time understanding this till I got enlightened from this great blog by Rob who has put up some great videos about How-to Configure Hyper-V and create VM's. Great work there!

So, once you are on your Windows Server 2008 x-64 bit OS, here are the steps which you need to follow

a. Configure the BIOS for Hyper-V

http://ts2blogs.com/blogs/rwagg/archive/2009/04/13/so-you-want-to-get-started-with-hyper-v-start-here-part-1.aspx

b. Installing the Hyper-V role

http://ts2blogs.com/blogs/rwagg/archive/2009/04/14/so-you-want-to-get-started-with-hyper-v-start-here-part-2.aspx

c. Setting up a Virtual Machine Network

http://ts2blogs.com/blogs/rwagg/archive/2009/04/15/so-you-want-to-get-started-with-hyper-v-start-here-part-3.aspx

d. Creating a VM

http://ts2blogs.com/blogs/rwagg/archive/2009/02/28/how-to-setup-a-virtual-machine-in-windows-server-2008.aspx

So, these are the basic steps you need to follow to configure your Hyper-V and get your first Virtual Machine running. I was lucky as I had already got a pre-configured virtual hard disk running Windows Server 2003. So, I just needed to bring the virtual machine to the network and then start installing SQL and AX on it.

Next - will soon blog about my experience configuring Clustered VM's. Till then, Happy Virtualizaing... :-)