Run the Microsoft Dynamics® AX 2012 Hyper-V pre-release image without a Hyper-V server

PA-22040759-0

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With the latest version of VirtualBox from Oracle, you can run Hyper-V images from a PC without Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V - for example a box with Windows 7.

There are a few special things you must do in order to make the Dynamics 2012 image work with VirtualBox:

Setup the disks as IDE disks. It won't work as SATA disks.
Setup two network cards:
- Adapter 1 should be configured for "NAT"
- Adapter 2 should be configured for "Internal Network"

When the virtual server is started you need to change the TCP/IPv4 network setting for the first adapter:

Select "Use the following IP address"
IP address: 192.168.0.1
Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
Select "Use the following DNS server addresses"
Preferred DNS server: 192.168.0.1

(UPDATE April 12th: It seems like you don't need to do these tcp/ip network changes in the new Beta image)

I'm not too sure about the network card settings, as to why they have to be configured like this, but this configuration works and resemble the Hyper-V settings as closely as I could figure it out. If anyone has some actual knowledge about this, I'd love to hear about it.

You can safely diable all the Hyper-V related services on the machine if you want to save the extra overhead. VirtualBox is not using them.

I have tried the image with only 2 GB of RAM for the virtual server. It runs (except for Enterprise Portal), albeit very slow. 4 GB or more gives you a more acceptable performance.

Check the license requirements for VirtualBox. In most cases it is free. But if you, for example, roll it out as part of your business operations you might have to buy a license.

Please share your experiences running the image this way.

Oh - and the Dynamics AX 2012 image itself!? Well, if you don't have it already - you're unfortunately not eligible to get it yet and you'll have to wait for coming releases.
Try the links mentioned here though: http://kashperuk.blogspot.com/2011/04/microsoft-dynamics-ax-2012-beta-now.html

UPDATE: Also check out this step-by-step guide, including a great tip to make SharePoint work as expected: http://dynamicsnavax.blogspot.com/2011/04/how-to-run-ax2012-hyperv-on-virtualbox.html