I then came across VMware player and was surprised to see how easy it was to install it and it did allow me to do all the testing without ever requiring another machine. In a nutshell, it installs another virtual computer within an existing computer.

These are the steps I followed:

1. Download VMware Player (free) from here:

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

2. Download an Operating System:

I downloaded a trial version of Windows Server 2008 R2 which last 180 days, more than enough for my purpose.

3. Install VMware player

The installation is very much straight forward. While installing, it will ask for an Operating System installation file.

Job done. There is now another machine available in my desktop computer and I can test anything I like. I installed SQL Server Denali CTP3 and enjoyed playing with it without having to worry about breaking my existing setup.

One thing to bear in mind is that the machine on which VMware Player is installed needs to have enough resources to share. When installing VMware, it automatically allocated 40gb of disk space, 1Gb of RAM and 1 CPU. Those setting are entirely customisable.

When installing Windows, I did provide the registration key when asked. But when going through the activation process, I got an error.

I then decided to change the product key and enter again the same key as I did during the registration process and that solved the problem.

Please find below the steps I went through:

Activate Windows 2008

Click on Activate Windows online now

Activating...

Windows activation error

Click on change product key

Enter the product key again

Activating...

Activation successful

It is only when I was trying to access that server remotely that I got into problems! It just couldn’t connect to the sql server and was getting the folowing error:

SQL Server 2008 Remote Access error

I tried accessing via IP address as well but that wasn’t successfull either. A look into the firewall was then in order. By default in Windows 2008 Server every ports, except a very few ones, are disabled. If you are using the default port for your sql engine, the port number 1433 needs to be enabled. I have also enabled port number 1434 for SQL Browser service. The following screen shots shows the step needed to allow remote access to sql server 2008 on a windows 2008 server.

First of all, you need to ensure that Remote Connections are allowed within SQL Server configuration:

Right click on the registered server and choose Properties

Check Allow remote connections box

Once this is done, you can start looking into the Firewall setting.

This is how to access Windows Firewall setting on Windows Server 2008

Firewall main screen

Click on Inbound Rules

Righ click on Inbound Rules and choose Add...

Choose Port

Choose TCP and type the Port number

Choose Allow the connection

Uncheck if further restrictions apply in your environment

Name it accordingly

That's it!

Now, if you also want to set the SQL Browser service port, you just need to choose UDP instead of TCP.

SQL Browser service - UDP Port 1434

Good luck!

This is how I changed the page file location on Windows Server 2008:

Right Click on My Computer and click on Properties

Click on Advance tab > Performance Settings

Performance Options > Advanced > Change...

Select C drive and choose No Paging File

Select D drive and choose System Managed

I prefered to have Windows managing the size of it as I have plenty of memory and disk space.