Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

One of the reasons I have been slowing down on blog posts is my virtual machine / blog development environment was still running XI 3.0. Over the past week I have managed to get my VM upgraded to XI 3.1 SP2 and that gives me quite a few new goodies to play with. I am looking forward to seeing how I can use and abuse input controls among other things.

I did encounter one slight issue. My VM host operating system is Windows Server 2003. The XI 3.1 install went fine. The SP2 install never did anything. During the install process it was complaining about a server issue and said something like, “… you may encounter isssues and if you do please read Microsoft KB article blah blah blah…” After I finally decided to pay attention and look up that KB article (and apply the fix available) everything went fine. It had to do with the .msi file (installation file) being too large for my server operating system to validate.

I took a BIAR file from my XI 3.0 virtual machine and restored it on the 3.1 system. My reports and universes all moved over just fine.

I have to say that virtual machines are AWESOME. 🙂 I now have VM images for 6.5, XI R2, XI 3, and XI 3.1 SP2. I can launch any of these as I need them. Perhaps I need to confirm that a technique that I am using in XI 3.1 is backwards compatible… I can do that. Maybe I want to test the impact of an upgrade, I can start in 6.5 and roll it forward through various versions. All it takes is disk space, and disk space is cheap today. When I was a consultant it was a great way for me to create separate environments for each client. Now I just use it to maintain different environments without having to manage multiple installations on one hardware. It’s also a great way to set up a “demo system” for use in presentations.

Oh, and blog posts. 😎