Alpesh Nakar's Blog

This is a continuation of the series Re Imaging SharePoint VMs on the fly.

Now that you have captured your bootable virtual hard drive that was prepared for SharePoint Installation, you can apply that to another active partition or a virtual hard drive and then install whichever flavour of SharePoint you please!

As seen in the earlier post, capturing a virtual hard drive to create a Windows Image File is time consuming (compared to taking a snapshot in VMWare or Hyper-V) and memory intensive as well, however the advantage is that you can leverage on bare metal power – like having dual boot or multi-boot environment on your laptop.

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This is a continuation of the series Re Imaging SharePoint VMs on the fly.

Once you have finished with the task of preparing the virtual machine, it’s time to create a Windows Image File (WIM) for re-use at a later stage.

Navigate to the folder where you have imagex.exe

Run this command

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This is continuation of the blog post series on Reimaging SharePoint VMs on the fly.

Quick recap: In the earlier post, we have created a vhd and enabled the vhd to be bootable.

In this post, I am now logged into the vhd and ready to prepare my virtual machine for installing SharePoint 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, it’s coming! If you haven’t heard, read then here is the repeat of the buzz… SharePoint Service Pack 1 is expected to be released in late June, 2011!

I am interested in this service pack more then ever, for a reason – self service recovery of site collections and sites! As a site collection administrator, if your user has deleted a site what options do you have to recover them?

If you have a recent backup (which you would) and on-site (which you should not) then out of the box you can recover the site from an unattached content database… but that’s going to cost – time and resources. Read the rest of this entry »

Using Imagex to apply an image in the following scenario’s is known and commonly used

1. Apply an image to a vhd
2. Apply an image to an active partition

So how about creating a base image and then capture that in a WIM (Windows Image) that you can backup and reuse whenever you want, instead of having to install Windows Server 2008 R2 OS and SQL and the works!

Once you have this base wim captured, apply this to the vhd that you will boot into and in turn leverage on full 8GB RAM or 16GB…. bare metal power! Read the rest of this entry »

Joel Oleson has authored SharePoint 2010: Best Practices for Upgrading and Migrating book and is offering 45 day online access to this book for anyone and everyone!

That’s very generous of Joel and I would like to thank him for this!

I have just signed up online and now have access to this book.

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Now that SharePoint 2010 Beta and Office 2010 Beta is available to download from MSDN, TechNet and Connect website, points to note (for self reference) from Jie Li’s Blog post.

1. This beta is not supported and you CANNOT upgrade the installation to RTM when it’s released. This Beta should only be used for evaluation purpose.
2. Windows Server 2008 R2 requires a hotfix which is not yet released to have the service applications running so I don’t recommend to use that now. Web Server Editions are not supported.

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