Mar 31 2010
Virtual Machine Upgrade To XI 3.1 SP2 Complete
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. 😎
Hi Dave,
I remember from one of your older blogs that you have 8 GB of RAM in your at-that-time-new laptop. Question – which OS do you use on the laptop that can work with that much RAM? Is it Windows 7 or anything else? And which SW do you use for VM?
Thank you.
I think 32-bit Enterprise versions of Windows prior to Win 7 / Vista, like Win Server 2003 which Dave says he’s running (assuming he’s running an Enterprise version) support the PAE switch. That would allow Windows to give applications each their own address space, up to 4GB, depending on how much RAM you have in the system.
So in an 8GB system, I think Windows would be running within the standard 4GB of RAM, and the app you’re running would get the other 4GB, with Windows tricking the app into thinking it was accessing the standard 4GB.
Not sure what the total RAM limit is for this – 16GB maybe? Also not sure what Windows does if you run multiple apps – does it dynamically reduce the amount of memory available to each app, or once the running apps have gobbled up all of the space beyond 4GB, in 4GB chunks, do additional apps drop back to sharing the standard 4GB of RAM with the OS?
I am running Windows Vista Home Premium (64 bit) on my HP HDX 16 laptop. I have a bare minimum of stuff installed on the “host” operating system, as I primarily use it to run virtual machine images. For that, I use software from VMWare. Right now I have both version 1 and version 2 running (on different systems). My laptop is running VMware Server 2.0.1.
The “guest” operating system is Windows Server 2003. It’s 32 bit software, but has no problems running on the 64 bit host operating system. I have about 4GB of RAM (3600MB) allocated to the virtual system and it runs great. Earlier I was running a similar setup on a 2GB system and it was… functional. Not ideal, but functional. I am very happy with my current system.
I agree about VMs – we have ESXi 4 setup as a test lab and it’s so easy to chop and change environments. Good for development purposes – but additional features like snapshots, backups etc need to be tested if they are to be used in a production BO environment.
When away from the office I use MS Virtual PC and VM Player. In fact just went through the pain of upgrading from Vista 32bit to 64bit just so my VMs can make use of the extra memory. Still haven’t decided between MS or VMware – MS Virtual PC seems to be smoother on my laptop, but I’m not sure it is actually a 64 bit app.
Great blog BTW.
Hello Dave,
Love your posts. We recently upgraded our server with XI R3 SP2 FP 2.1 and have been receiving an error message “API ProcessDPCommands’ Error: ERR WIS 30270 which impacts running reports. This seems to occur when using specific prompt filters. We have tried recreating the filter but have run into the same error. BO has not been very helpful. Have you run into this issue as of yet? Thanks for all of your help!
Huw, I started with the Microsoft VM. However, I found VMware to be much faster at booting and general performance so I switched. When I worked for Integra we used VMware images for all of our classroom workstations, which was great. After a class we would roll each system back to the preserved snapshot and we have a completely clean system ready for the next session.
With my older (slower) laptop I found that moving the VM image to an external hard disk – especially a 7200 RPM disk – improved the performance substantially. My boot times went from 5 minutes or more down to about 2 minutes on my older system. My newer laptop does not have these problems. 🙂
Pat, I have not run into that specific error. It might help if you post the error along with the specific syntax that you are using in your prompt on BOB where you will get responses from a wider audience.
I’ve definitely had a fun time abusing the input controls! I’m going to cover some of that in the Web Intelligence presentation in May in Orlando!