Over the last few months I went through a lot of frustration trying to run SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio betas and CTPs in VPC. The main issue was the speed of the guest OS. Installs in particular are pretty bad, just a VS install can take several hours. I've heard from several people that they gave up on VPC and just invested in a second laptop to play with the new stuff.
I've done a lot of experimentation with different configurations and I am pleased to say that I finally have a winner. The downside is that it took a $400 investment, but at least now the speed of my CTPs is almost as good as the speed of my host OS. Here is what did the trick:
- Place the virtual machine on external hard drive (USB in my case)
- Use fixed-size disks instead of dynamic disks
- Upgrade RAM to 2GB
- Allocate 1GB of RAM to the guest OS