Finally upgraded to 64-bits, with a few notes about virtualization

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Well, I found an unexpected sliver of time. I'd been planning for a while to replace the 32-bit version of Vista with a 64-bit install for a while. The upgrade went very smoothly. I used "Windows Easy Transfer", but I got a few superfluous settings since there is some software that I'm not going to install this time around. I'd thought about installing Windows Server 2008--I've used the "Hyper-V" virtualization technology, and it's really fast and nice. In the end, I decided to stay with client software ("Vista") rather than server software ("Windows Server 2008").

Visual Studio 2008 is running great on 64-bit Vista. I still run a virtualized version of TFS, and I like to run Virtual Server more than Virtual PC. Usually, I install and configure my own images, but this time I'm using one created by someone else. The weird side effect is that I couldn't apply my undo logs to the virtual hard drive--I got a permissions error I couldn't directly overcome. Since I'd made a lot of changes, I was annoyed.

However, I discovered something cool--the undo file ("TFSRTMXXXX...vud") is just a virtual hard drive with a ".vud" extension instead of a ".vhd" extension. I renamed the file to "DeltaDisk.vhd", and inspected it--it was just a differencing disk, which I wanted on this virtual server anyway. I reconfigured the virtual server to refer to the "DeltaDisk.vhd" file and turned on undo logs, and any of the changes get merged into the delta disk instead of the one I got from a co-worker.

I also had to set up a loopback adapter (since I don't always have a usable network connection), but that's a piece of cake. I put the IP address in the same range as the default for the virtual DHCP server, and host-to-guest networking was running great. Technet's entry on Manage Virtual Networks was a great checklist.

The image I was working with didn't have a build server on it. Normally, I wouldn't want one on the same server as TFS, but since it's for demonstrations I wanted to add one. There's some good information at Setting up a Build Computer on MSDN. Note that for me, when I was changing the build service account, that wcfhttpconfig.exe wasn't in "cd C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE", but was in "cd C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies".

If you're trying to work with TFS on a Virtual Server, I'd spend some time at this guy's blog: Virtual PC Guy's WebLog. I did set up the web interface using these instructions: blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2006/11/17/using-virtual-server-on-windows-vista-without-running-ie-as-administrator.aspx, but the really great discovery was using VMRCPlus instead:

I also refer to Installing Virtual Server on Windows Vista Beta 2 when setting up Virtual Server on Vista.