Creating a MS CRM 2011 VM Part 2 of 2

Performance Note: VirtualBox allows you to set more CPU’s for your virtual machine than you should. I ended up using 3 CPU’s for my i7 although it is a hyperthreading and shows 8 cores. I found it MUCH faster set to 3 CPU’s instead of say 4.

To speed the installation up turn off the SharePoint Websites for now. Go to IIS Manager and stop the SharePoint sites. You may want to leave this off until installing the SharePoint List component in MS CRM and you will probably only want these turned on when you are using SharePoint, otherwise they

Visual Studio 2010 Installation

VS 2010 is a very straight forward installation. It also installs a number of other prerequisites needed for MS CRM 2011 like .NET 4.0.

Mount your VS 2010 iso image and select it.

When that is complete you may want to make another snapshot of your VM.

At this point your VM’s dvi file should be about 21Gb in size.

 

Reporting Services Installation

Go to the Start button and click on All Programs

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 –>Configuration Tools –> Reporting Service Configuration Manager

Click Connect

Click Web Service URL  then Click Apply

 

Click on Database and Change Database

Create a new report server database

Click Next

Click Next

Click Next

Click Next

Click Finish

Click on Report Manager URL and click apply.

 
Once again this is a test VM, so I gave this my Administrator account. You probably won’t be be using connectivity to remote servers anyway.  

   

This is good enough for the MS CRM installation to finish successfully.

 

MS CRM 2011 Beta Installation

Included in the download area is the file MicrosoftDynamicsCRM2011BetaIG.zip containing:  MicrosoftDynamicsCRM2011BetaInstallingGuide.doc

You can refer to that document if there is anything in my instructions below that you need more information about. Page 13 starts “Install Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Server on a server without Microsoft Dynamics CRM installed”

Start by going to you shared folder where you need to copy the CRM2011 executables that you need and copy them to the VM’s desktop. For now we just want the CRM Server and the SharePoint List component.

Create a CRM2011Beta folder on your desktop and click on the CRM2011-server-ENU-amd64.exe file and extract the contents into this folder.

Open the CRM2011Beta folder –> server –> amd64
Double click on setserver.exe

The Beta was just released so there is no point in getting any updates yet.

MS CRM Workgroup (5 CAL limit): FF2JM-QX9PG-HXT8M-MMHXG-4MF32
MS CRM Server (no CAL limit): 4FDTK-3HYV2-D9CCJ-4MF9Q-QJ32X

Next put in the appropriate key above.  Notice the 270 day expiration period!

Accept the license agreement.

Install the prerequisites.

Select an installation location or keep the default.

Click Next and install all of the roles.

Type in the name of your VM Server.

Click Browse and just select the top node. Click OK and Next.

Specifying a Security Account. For a production system you will not want  to do this, but for our demo system, just select Network service account.  There is an additional step required for the SharePoint document management feature when doing this.

You want to create a new website to avoid any conflict with SharePoint and other sites. Keep 5555 for the port. You should have selected 9999 for the SharePoint site if you followed the instructions.

We are NOT going to set up an Email router at this time. Notice the note. This can be done later.  (Setting up Exchange Server and Outlook on a test environment is worth doing especially with the new multi-tenant support in Outlook)

Pick an organization name for your system. It will name the Database automatically. Leave the rest alone.

Take the default reportserver name unless you have installed it somewhere else.

 

Decide if you want to take part in the use experience and click Next.

Next Installation

It may sit like this for a while. Be patient…

Getting close now.  Check the box to set up the SSRS extensions, and click Finish!

 

Installing the SSRS Connector

If you decided not to start this when the CRM installation finished. On your desktop go to the srsdataconnector folder  CRM2011Beta\server\amd64\srsdataconnector  and Double click on the file SetupSrsDataConnector.exe

Click Next

Accept the license agreement

 

 

The warnings are OK for a demo, development box.  Click Next. 

 

 

The Moment of truth….

At this point I shut the system down. It was apparent that it was running out of memory with 4Gb RAM. So I shut it down to make a snapshot and to increase the memory to about 6Gb to see if that was usable.

It seemed much faster after the reboot. It is interesting to note that it is only using about 2.5Gb of RAM without SharePoint running.

Now turn on the SharePoint Sites again.

Create a SPList folder on your desktop. Copy the  CRM2011-SharePointList-ENU-amd64.exe  file from the Shared Folder areato the VM’s desktop and double click on it.

Browse to your new folder, and click OK.

Read the following inside the SPList folder for instructions to install the SP List Component.

Microsoft_Dynamics_CRM_2011_List_Component_Readme.htm

More to come. I have to do something else for a little while…

Good luck with the new Beta!