SharePoint installation on personal computer (licensing, virtualization & non-domain queries)

Question

I want to setup a sharepoint development environment on my home pc. I have some questions:

• Which one is better: using vmware or installing windows server 2008 on other partition?

• For sharepoint 2010 and windows server how can i handle the license problem. How long are their trials? Should i use them as trial and re-install afer trial period and so on?

• What about non-domain environment for sharepoint?

Answer 1

For sharepoint 2010 and windows server how can i handle the license problem. How long are their trials? Should i use them as trial and re-install afer trial period and so on?

You'll need to be covered by an MSDN license (which should be the case if you're working for a company and which is heavily recommended if you are a freelance). That will give you activation keys for all required Microsoft products (don't forget that you'll also need activation for SQL Server 2008 / 2012, Visual Studio 2010/2012.

(nb : A technet subscription is not enough as you are not supposed to do development under that license).

Alternatively, you can go the trial road and download all softwares as trial and repeat the process after 90 days / a few months but that's a lot of trouble.

A third solution is to rely on the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine which contains a three Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V Virtual Machine set for evaluating and demonstrating Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Project Server 2010. You'll need to start from Windows 8 or from Windows Server 2008(R2) for the Hypervisor (or convert it to a Virtual Box / VMWare instance)

Which one is better: using vmware or installing windows server 2008 on other partition?

I'm a big fan of Virtual Box. It allowed me to create a full security trimmed farm with a dedicated AD / SQL Server / Apps Server and 2 WFEs (manually load balanced ;)) on my host machine which is perfect to test real world deployments but if you have a not so powerful machine or only 4GB of ram, I would heavily suggest to implement a boot to VHD solution. You create a virtual disk within your Windows 7, mark it as bootable and then do the Windows Server 2008R2 on it. You'll reboot on your VHD and thus use the full power of your machine (and you can easily backup the single vhd file just like suggested for Virtual Box.

What about non-domain environment for sharepoint?

If you're doing client object development, client side or middle tier development, that's ok. If you're doing serious business with SharePoint, forget it. You'll never, ever deploy in an environment with no security constraint and with that configuration.

Hope it helps.

Answer 2

I use a laptop with 8 gb of ram running windows 7. I'we installed Visual Studio 2012 and Sharepoint Server 2010 on it to. It's running fine.

If you want to install SP2010 on a workstation, you need to modify the installation.

Here is a good article on how to set it up.

Answer 3

Depending on what you want to do?

Both are fine todo but I would recommend the vm!

for me as a developer at home and at work I have vm (Oracle VM VirtualBox) and highly recommend it :) .

The reasons why I recommend is you can setup sp and your server on the vhd. You can then copy the virtual hard drive (vhd) for backup. If you break sharepoint or server you can recreate it as you saved that vhd. Plus you can run multiple versions at the same time :) and you can develop on it freely!

SharePoint Foundation 2010 is free! no need to renew but you need to hav a licence for the server:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/Pages/Licensing-Details.aspx

as for the third question hava a look at this:

http://blog.novasoftware.com/2012/08/install-sharepoint-in-non-domain.html#!/2012/08/install-sharepoint-in-non-domain.html

hope this answer was some use to you :)

Answer 4

1. VM or Setup on another partion
   You can use VM on your machine if you can assign atleast 3 GB of RAM. 4 GB is recommended and 5 or more GB is better. If you cannot assign at least 3 GB then go for installing on another partion

2. Trail
   Trail is good enough, you will have 6 months to use that. Windows 2008, SQL Server and SharePoint 2010 Server comes with 180 days trial.

3. No domain environment
   If you want to use in non environment and you have 64 bit of Windows 7 or Vista you can install a development environment right on your laptop without Windows Server. Take a look at this http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869.aspx

I would recommend you to use in a domain environment to have feel exactly like a farm environment. Some SharePoint classes like SPFarm won't work if you don't use domain environment. (I have faced that problem earlier)