Mounting the AX 2009 Demo VPC under Hyper-V

I recently was asked to make sure that we could demonstrate AX 2009 outside MS Virtual PC 2007. I admit that Virtual PC is not the ideal virtualization environment for demos especially if you don't have a secondary hard drive with sufficent performance (a fast disk) and sufficent memory resources. Since most people carry a standard business configured laptop computer, it's hard to run a virtual machine with satisfactory performance.

The other issue is whether to utilize the standard demo VPC's (Microsoft has 2 demo VPC for AX 2009) or to create your own. Since setting up and configuring a complete AX 2009 solution has become an hour intensive task due to the number of components and supporting software required, I decided to use the standard VPC provided from Microsoft (17 files for download for demo VPC 1 aka AX-SRV-01).

An additional requriement was that users should be able to connect to the virtual machine remotely.


Here are the tasks I perfomed to provide the standard demo VPC under Hyper-V:

1. Downloaded 17 files for demo VPC 1 on my laptop


2. Exctracted the VHD to my laptop


3. Mounted the VHD under Virtual PC 2007 and started the VM with public networking


4. Updated the VM with the latest security updates and verified that the firewall was running


5. (Now I could have uninstalled the Virtual Machine Additions, but I decided to to this after mounting the VHD under Hyper-V)


6. After stopping the VM, I copied the VHD to the Hyper-V host (approxemaetly 30 Gb)


7. Mounted the VHD under Hyper-V and started it through the Hyper-V console with public networking (no networking will be enabled until Integration Services is installed)


8. Uninstalled Virtual Machine Additions and restarted the VM (some creativity was needed at this stage to be able to access Windows Explorer)


9. Installed Hyper-V Integration Services and restarted the VM


10. At this point the VM was fully operational including Remote Desktop Connections , but none of the configured Web Sites was working...


11. After investigating the Web Site configuration, I noticed that they where configured to use host headers which led me to further investigate the DNS configuration. Without beeing a DNS expert, I concluded that the relationship between the defined DNS records and the original IP configuration (192.168.0.1) on the one side and the forward lookup zone on the other, was important. I did NOT want to tamper or alter the DNS configuration to avoid a lot of reconfiguration (remember that the server runs several roles including Domain Controller).


12. After stopping the VM, I created a new private virtual network (Hyper-V networking) and I added a second network card that I bound to the newly defined network


13. After starting the VM once again, I defined a static IP (192.168.0.1) on the new network interface and voila - all Web Sites where operational and accessible again without any reconfiguration.

I allocated 3 Gb of memory and one virtual CPU to the VM under Hyper-V.

The overall performance of the VM was supprisingly good even when executed on a Hyper-V host with local disks (no SAN) and sharing resources with a large number of other virtual machines.

The major limitation with this setup, is the number of concurrent RDP sessions (WTS running in admin mode).