Earlier this month I presented a SQL Server Reporting Services session to the Ottawa SQL Server user group. I was a bit hesitant to re-install my presentation machine to move from Windows 7 RC to RTM. After all, I didn’t have a lot of time after Windows 7 RTM was released on MSDN before I needed to present. I decided to bite the bullet and do it anyway. It turned out to be a good move (hey, sometimes even I’m lucky :)
I was able to run my demos flawlessly using SQL Server 2008 SP1, running on a Windows Server 2008 SP2 virtual machine. I ran everything from the VM in full screen mode (including the PowerPoint slides) using the release candidate of Windows Virtual PC on top of Windows 7 x64 Ultimate RTM. The only slight performance problem didn’t come from SQL Server but one of the PowerPoint slides that had animations (go figure).
Some of the attendees were asking what kind of hardware I was running on so here’s the low down:
Laptop – Dell Studio XPS 16; Processor – Intel Core 2 Duo T9600; RAM – 8 GB
With this rig I was able to comfortably dedicate 3 GB of RAM to the virtual machine. I have to say it was nice to be able to run everything from the VM.
Since I do a lot of demos and testing (playing) with new versions of software I like to keep my host OS installed with a minimum of applications. No SSMS, Visual Studio or anything of the likes, just a stable release of Office 2007 applications. I don’t want to go the Hyper-V route on the laptop hard drive, because I want to take advantage of the graphics card and the mobile power management feature. Besides, I can take advantage of Hyper-V by booting off the eSATA connector (one of the main requirements on my shortlist for the laptop purchase!!!).
After using Windows 7 RTM for 2 weeks, I can honestly say that I haven’t experienced any issues and performance has been smoking. (Funny thing is that I can say the same thing about my Windows 7 RC experience too!)
So, what’s next? Time to dig into BitLocker to see if the performance story continues. ***Yes! I can finally have the laptop, my portable USB hard drive and USB thumb drive all encrypted by the same system!!!*** (Have laptop will travel… with data this time, no more bad dreams, no more paranoia… LOL)
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