SharePointers

Months (years?) behind the rest of the world, I've finally decided it's time to get my VMs up to Azure (no more SSD swapping between PC and laptop despite having a easily mountable caddy in my work laptop and this sweet caddy in my PC . As a loyal VirtualBox user I opted for VDI rather than VHD, but now I must convert.  So here's what I did: Uninstall VBox Guest Additions from the VM Shut the VM down (don't save the state). Remove the VDI from the Virtual Media Manager in Virtual box before running the command below Run the following command using Run As Administrator by right-clicking on the command prompt (from the VBox Install directory unless you've set the PATH variable):  VBoxManage clonehd e:\SP2013DEV.vdi  c:\SP2013DEVaz.vhd --format VHD In the above command the first file is the source VDI the second is the destination VHD. Wait for the magic to happen it should take a while since VMs with SP on them are pretty big.  Going from one drive to another...

I use virtual box as my SharePoint VM host because I want to be able to run 64bit Server 2008 R2 on my Windows 7 host machine.   When I first installed SharePoint 2010, the VDI (Virtual Disk for VirtualBox) I created was too small, so I had to expand it.   This is a bit of a challenge, but by doing some research I figured out how to do it. The process involves creating a new, larger disk and copying the original boot and main partitions to the newer disk.   This can be done with gparted .  and the steps to do so are well documented here However there are a few more steps you'll need to follow because you are using 64bit Server 2008 R2: After you've followed the above instructions, mount the newer larger drive as the Primary Master and mount the Server 2008 R2 ISO. Boot to the ISO (hitting any key when prompted) Choose your language then on the next screen select repair Select the partition and click ok Choose the command line option Switch to your c: drive ...

In my experience, a typical standalone MOSS installation on a Server 2003 machine will use at least 12-14Gb of space, not counting any other add-ons you're using (antivirus, etc). Unfortunately for those of us who use Virtual Server/Virtual PC for SharePoint development purposes, the default drive setup is a fixed-size 16Gb IDE drive, which doesn't leave much wiggle room. If you, like me, saw the 16 gigs during the installation and said "oh, that should be enough", and are now eating your words, this post is for you. Virtual Server/Virtual PC doesn't have a built-in way to resize .vhd files, but fortunately there are a few options available. Instead of using a somewhat pricey tool like Ghost, there are a few free alternatives. My favorite is appropriately named VhdResizer, and is available here [vmtoolkit.com]. After its installed, just point it at your old .vhd (shut down the vm first) and plug in the name/path of where you want the newer, bigger one. Allo...