Developing on multiple VPC's

Hi guys,

I'm wondering what technologies you're using for developing CRM projects. Especially when you have multiple clients..

Personally I use virtual machines via Virtual PC. Each PC is about 10 gb huge though. So I was looking around on the internet and I found a good solution to that. Now this is what I do:

- Create one VPC which has Windows Server 2003, MSSQL, CRM, Sharepoint, Office, Visual Studio etc
- Shutdown that VPC and mark the harddisk file as read only
- Create a new VPC based on that harddisk with a check set at 'Enable undo disk' (and RAM adjusted to something like 1400 mb)
- Modify CRM to meet the customer needs
- Shutdown the VPC by using 'Save State and Save Changes'
- Make sure that 'Commit changes to the virtual harddisk' is UNCHECKED
- Select 'OK'

By doing so, you would only need 1 huge VPC and the rest are small files of about 500 mb till 2 gb. That saves me sooo much space and time! If somebody asks me a question and I dont have crm at hand, then just create a new vpc, start it (that takes a while though), run the test and remove the undo disk. Done!

You can use the Public demo VPC by Microsoft, but keep in mind that there are modifications made to that VPC which you should undo first.

Hope this helps you as well!

Ronald

5 comments:

Lunitik said...

Use diff disks dude. That way you can have a bunch of small 2 gig images (zipped up they usually are about 100 megs) laying around in case you need to go back and develop on a previous project.

Ronald Lemmen said...

Hi Jake,

Thats exactly what I tried to make clear in this article. These days I'm using those diff disks, but not zipped though. Thanks for your reply anyway!

Ronald

Vishwas said...

Hi Ronald ,
I am vishwas from india , I have a problem , i need to update few field on the "Case entity" in bulk
for eg: I neeed to select 5 cases and update four fields of that entity.
how can i do this...

please help me ..

Vishwas said...

also how can i create lookups that allow multiple selection

Ronald Lemmen said...

Dear Vishwas,

Please use the community forums for regular questions. You'll find those here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm/bb501031.aspx

You can post questions related to the blog posts on this page.

Kind regards,
Ronald