In the last public SharePoint 2010 class we had to provide preconfigured laptops to about 70% of the students. Surprisingly many laptops with 4GB of RAM and Intel processors do not support virtualization on the chip and many come with 32 bit OS which wastes about 1 GB of RAM.

I am still surprised that Microsoft is pretty much killing Virtual PC by not allowing guest 64 bit operating systems when many of its new products are 64 bit only. We’ve used Virtual PC since 2003, but now it’s all VMWare as it’s the only viable solution for training. Sure MS recommends other options that we ruled out after spending enough time to realize that they would be a nightmare in a classroom environment.

  • Booting from a VHD. If you do it right it works well. If you mess it up (and don’t back up the boot record), you are in real trouble
  • Using Hyper-V. Well, how many people do you know that run Server 2008 on their laptops?
  • Installation of all software on Windows 7 is possible, but not something that you should expect from a student before class.

Setting up VMWare image takes 10-20 minutes which is about how much time you have before someone gets frustrated with setup. Hopefully, people will keep upgrading their laptops to processors that support virtualization, solid state drives, and 64 bit operating systems. This way we don’t have to ship big boxes to/from DC.