The Future of the AX Demonstration Environment

Hi All

As the launch of AX 2012 gets closer I thought it worthwhile to flag up the future demonstration environment of this release. It is fair to say that any Demonstration VMs for AX 2012 will only run through the Hyper-V platform. The PTA Team has discussed this point with partners in some depth over the last few years on how our demonstration environments would migrate to this technology. However what has become apparent is that we still have partners running the demonstration toolkits through Virtual PC. This is fine but clearly you won’t be able to take advantage of any of our 64 Bit Technologies such as SharePoint 2010. And with the consideration of AX 2012 I would strongly recommend that it is time to change.

So in short I wanted to bring this to everyone’s attention in plenty of time, prior to launch. There are numerous articles on how you can configure your laptops to dual boot between Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 or how you can simply run Server 2008 R2 as your preferred operating system. Applying the desktop themes over Server 2008 R2 provides an experience which is almost identical to the UI of Windows 7.

Here’s one article to get you started from our TechNet Wiki, to access the article Click Here. In terms of machine specifications, I’d rather not get into too much detail as this is a debate which has many answers!!! However I personally run a machine with 16 Gbyte RAM, Intel i7 vPro Processor and a secondary hard drive in the media bay to store the VMs. Once it is up and running it quite literally flies.

So I encourage you all, if you have not already done so, to start migrating your Presales and Consultants machines to run the Hyper-V environment.

Regards

Andrew