Prisoners serving life sentences (in Canada) have what is known as a faint hope clause where you have a glimmer of a chance of getting parole after 15 years. However, those waiting for Microsoft to provide us a version of Virtual PC that can run Virtual Hard Drives (VHDs) hosting 64-bit operating systems (such as Windows Server 2008 R2), have no such hope of ever seeing that piece of software. But miracles do happen, and I hope that the release of a 64-bit capable Virtual PC renders this section of the chapter obsolete. If this has in fact happened, go with it and proceed to the following section.
Head into your computer's BIOS settings and enable the virtualization setting. The exact setting you are looking for varies widely, so please consult with your manufacturer's documentation. This setting seems universally defaulted to off, so I am very sure you will need to perform this action.
Since you are still reading, however, it is safe to say that a miracle has not yet happened. Your first task is to select a suitable virtualization technology that can support a 64-bit guest operating system. The recipe here is to consider the choices in this order, with the outcome of your virtual environment being selected:
Microsoft Virtualization: Hyper-V certainly has the ability to create and run Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs) with 64-bit operating systems. It's free—that is, you can install the Hyper-V role, but it requires the base operating system to be Windows Server 2008 R2. It can be brutal to get it running properly on something like a laptop (for example, because of driver issues). It won't be a good idea to get Windows 2008 Server running on a laptop, primarily because of driver issues. I recommend that if your laptop is running Windows 7, look at creating a dual boot, and a boot to VHD where this other boot option / partition is Windows Server 2008 R2. The main disadvantage is coming up with an (preferably licensed) installation of Windows Server 2008 R2 as the main computer operating system (or as a dual boot option). Or perhaps your company runs Hyper-V on their server farm and would be willing to host your development environment for you? Either way, if you have managed to get access to a Hyper-V server, you are good to go!
VMware Workstation: Go to http://www.vmware.com and download my absolute favorite virtualization technology—VMware Workstation—fully featured, powerful, and can run on Windows 7. I have used it for years and love it. You must of course pay for a license, but please believe me, it is a worthwhile investment. You can sign up for a 30 day trial to explore the benefits. Note that you only need one copy of VMware Workstation to create a virtual machine. Once you have created it, you can run it anywhere using the freely available VMware Player.
Oracle Virtual Box: Go to http://www.virtualbox.org/ and download this free software that will run on Windows 7 and create and host 64-bit guest operating systems. The reason that this is at the bottom of the list is that I personally do not have experience using this software. However, I have colleagues who have used it and have had no problems with it. Give this a try and see if it works as equally well as a paid version of VMware.
With your selected virtualization technology in hand, head to the next section to install and configure Windows Server 2008 R2, which is the base operating system required for an installation of SharePoint Server 2010.