Hi!

A quick note that I must say in regards to hosting BizTalk in our virtual environment that Sun Virtual Box has really out did them. They have a really stable virtual machine product. BizTalk, SQL and MOSS have been running really smooth on my development box which runs Sun Virtual Box.

Another nice thing is that they continually update the product.

This is my strategy for templates.

I will build a Windows 2003/2008 Virtual Box base template.

1. Install Visual Studio 2008
2. Install SQL 2005/2008
3. Install BizTalk (DO NOT CONFIGURE)
4. Adapter Packs e.g. WCF LOB, SQL
5. DebugView
6. Resharper (if You like it)
7. Notepad++
8. Orchestration Profiler
9. BizTalk Environment Configuration: http://biztalkconfigloader.codeplex.com/

Rudolf Henning on CodePlex updated my original BizTalk Environment Configuration Tooland made some cool enhancements.

Then you can just close the template above for new developers or for new projects, of course you need a new computer name and IP address. The only trick is for SQL. When you close it, you just run the following command:

sp_dropserver <old_name>

GO

sp_addserver <new_name>, local

GO

A really stable product!

Sun Virtual Box is much better than VMware, hands down. Another aspect I like about Virtual Box is that you can use the console to work on the machine, and the mouse pointers etc feel as if the machine was real, no VMware tools or mouse pointer acceleration to deal with, or even remote desktop as Virtual Box has it’s own built in addin which is a must to install.

HTH

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