Virtual Machines and Sharepoint 2010

Publicly known now, SharePoint 2010 runs only on a 64-bit machine.  First thing came to my mind is what will the developer experience be like?

Running Windows 7 RTM with Virtual PC is really slick and fast.  I have a Windows Server 2003 / Sharepoint 2003 / Visual Studio 2008 machine and works great on a Dell XPS 1330.

Sadly, (PLEASE MICROSOFT FIX THIS), Virtual PC does not support a 64-Bit virtual OS. 

First i tried VM Ware.  Their free version offers a lot of really great feature, but a few things that i didn’t like.  First, it requires a Tomcat server to be installed to interface with the Virtual Machine.  Eck.  on my clean Windows 7, please dont!  Second, i kept getting failures (frozen) on in my Windows 2008 R2 during operations.

Uninstalled VM Ware and tried Virtual Box by Sun Microsystems.

So far, its working really well and quite fast; Windows Server 2008 R2 / SharePoint 2010 / Visual Studio 2010.  It even has some slick features such as “Seamless Mode”.

My issue now is that since Virtual technology grabs hold of your Vt-x/AMD-y processor, only one Virtual software solution can run at any given time.

I really like the native integration Virtual PC has with Windows 7 and don’t want to give it up.

Microsoft, Please support 64-bit virtual machines on a 64-bit host… please!

S.