Usage of Windows 2008 and SQL 2008 on the AX 2009 Demo VMs

  • Article

I’ve had a few questions on why we don’t update the AX2009 Demo VMs to Windows 2008 and SQL 2008. The reason is somewhat simple, today we use the time bomb process in Windows 2003 to control the usage of the VM. In Windows 2008 it uses the activation process which doesn’t allows us enough time windows to create the VM and get it into the hands of the partners and allow enough time for usage before the activation will expire the VM.

We are waiting for Windows 2008 R2 as this is expected to have a different mechanism for activation. Because we will have to rebuild the VMs based on this OS at that time we will update to SQL 2008 as well because it will require a full rebuild of the VMs.

Also another note that you should consider is the move to use Hyper-V as the virtualization technology. When we move to Windows 2008 R2 as the guest OS on the VMs it will be 64bit. At this time the only virtualization technology that we will be able to leverage will be Hyper-V. We know a lot of partners are already using Hyper-V today.

Cheers

LC