Siolon

A Beautiful Union: SharePoint and VMware Fusion

There aren’t many soft­ware appli­ca­tions that truly rev­o­lu­tion­ize the way I do busi­ness and plea­sure for that matter—that is, until VMware Fusion came along. Never could I have imag­ined that vir­tu­al­iza­tion could be this easy and enjoy­able at the same time, and it has made my work on Share­Point eas­ier and more enjoyable.

Tak­ing the Plunge

For a while I was doing all my vir­tu­al­iza­tion of MOSS inside Vir­tual PC which, to say the least, wasn’t the most enjoy­able expe­ri­ence. I tried run­ning it on my Sony Vaio with Vista (I did like the lap­top), and it just didn’t work out well for me. The com­puter was slow and unre­spon­sive. It didn’t make me feel as though I had truly recre­ated a production-like envi­ron­ment to do my Share­Point work in. Then I started see­ing that all the big Share­Point con­sul­tants were using Mac­Book Pros with VMware Fusion or Par­al­lels. I decided to take the plunge for a bet­ter experience.

After com­par­ing Par­al­lels and Fusion I decided to go with Fusion, and it was a good deci­sion! With my MBP which has 4 GB RAM, 2.8 Ghz proces­sor, and a 320 GB hard drive at 7200 RPM I run Share­Point faster than some ded­i­cated Microsoft Server setups I’ve seen! I can get in and do all my analy­sis and minor devel­op­ment quickly and eas­ily. It allows me to enjoy the best of OS X while still run­ning my nec­es­sary appli­ca­tions for my Share­Point work.

VMware Fusion in Action

Here are some screen­shots of Share­Point inside of VMware Fusion.  A recent VMware post out­lines one user run­ning Win­dows Share­Point Ser­vices 3.0 in Fusion, but here I am run­ning the full blown ver­sion of MOSS Enter­prise. You can also see screen­shots of me run­ning Visual Stu­dio 2008, SQL Server Man­age­ment Stu­dio, Pow­er­Shell, and MOSS in IE. I could even run all of this in unity mode quickly and seam­lessly.

MOSS in Fusion

Visual Stu­dio 2008 in Fusion

SQL Server Stu­dio in Fusion