SQL Business Intelligence Professional

I fully embrace the fact that SharePoint, integrated with the other Wave14 products (Office 2010, SQL 2008 R2), will be a large part of surfacing Business Intelligence analytics.  To that end, I have been struggling much like the rest of the SharePoint and Microsoft BI community, to create a laptop environment on which to develop amazing solutions for my customers.  SharePoint Joel created a great blog post that summarizes the key issues.

My post here is really about the strategy I have chosen, which entails installing Sun (i.e. Oracle) software on my primary development laptop for the first time since 2004.  In short, I am using Sun’s VirtualBox software to do something Microsoft products are not able to do:  Host a 64-bit ‘guest OS’ (Windows Server 2008) on a Windows 7 64-bit ‘host’ OS.

My primary motivation for this is summarized in the following arguments.

1. As a consultant, while I ‘can’ run Windows Server 2008 on my laptop, my laptop is connected to many client networks.  Including the networks of very security-conscious organizations (think financial sector and government).  Windows Server 2008 is always going to require passing through additional hoops to get on the network and get my job done.
2. As a consultant (read “someone paid by the hour”), I have an obligation to my client and myself to perform at peak efficiency.  Dual-booting from Win7 to Win Server 2008 is HARDLY conducive to this

So hey, Microsoft!  Add the ability to host a 64-bit Server OS from Win 7 and I will return to an all-Redmond solution.  Until then, the audiences for the 18-24 presentations that I do each year will see a Sun/Oracle product hosting my Microsoft BI demonstrations.

NOTE: If you should have issues with the dreaded verr_vmx_msr_locked_or_disabled error when attempting to launch your VirtualBox VM, ensure the following.

1. Ensure Hardware Virtualization is enabled in your BIOS
2. UNINSTALL VirtualBox
3. Reinstall VirtualBox

Because I installed VirtualBox BEFORE enabling hardware virtualization in the BIOS, I continued to receive the verr_vmx_msr_locked_or_disabled error.