Virtual Environment Setup

If you decide to go the Windows Server and virtual machine route versus physical, you’ll need a system with at least 16 GB of memory and a CPU capable of supporting native virtualization. In some cases, you will need to enable that feature in the BIOS of the system. For the purposes of the examples in this book, I’m using a self-built server based on an Asus M4A89GTD Pro motherboard with 16 GB of memory and an AMD 1090T 6-core CPU. For the operating system, I installed Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Enterprise Edition.

Once you have Windows Server installed, you must install the Hyper-V role in order to run multiple virtual machines. Microsoft has made available a packaged download of SharePoint trial virtual machines (VMs), which includes SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, and Project Server 2010. As this writing, you can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=27417.