With VirtualBox installed, I start out by building a “base” VM installation that I clone to create all of the other VMs that I need in my playground. Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3 for Windows Server 2008 R2 Windows Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1 Evaluation Edition
While we are covering downloads, the following additional items will be needed to setup the environment: To get started you are going to have to download and install VirtualBox from their site: However, as much as I love my copy of VMware Workstation, it isn’t free and you may not have the budget to purchase it as a base platform, so for the purposes of this series I decided to go with VirtualBox, which is a completely free alternative that also supports 64 bit guest VMs. One of the requirements for building this playground is that the virtual machines have to support 64 bit guests, which is not supported by Microsoft Virtual PC but is supported by VMware Workstation. I have been using VMware Workstation personally for the last few years as the platform for my playground, but only because I received a free license a few years ago when I spoke about virtualizing SQL Server using ESX at the VMware Open Forum in Orlando, FL. I recently had to rebuild my playground from the ground up and as a part of doing this I decided that I would blog about all the steps I took to build a completely FREE environment to play with SQL Server, including a virtual iSCSI “SAN” to support failover clustering. For the last few years, I have always had a personal virtual playground for SQL Server setup on my laptop that allowed me to not only learn about new features in SQL Server, but also demonstrate complex topics hands on during presentations.
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