Vision Test Server Under Construction

I’m building a virtual machine to run Deltek Vision. I had a physical machine that worked, running Windows 2003 server on a little HP desktop machine. It took a long time to install and patch, so I wanted to reuse the work I put into setting it up. I figured I could use the new VMware Converter 3 to convert it to a VM. I tried three times to create a VM from the physical machine but it errored out each time, with an unspecified error. I also tried using Norton Ghost to image the drive into a new virtual machine, but the VM ended up unbootable, and trying a repair from the Windows 2003 CD didn’t fix it.

I gave up on the physical-to-virtual conversion and started building a new VM in Windows 2003 server. So far it’s taken over eight hours to get a scratch-installed VM setup with Windows 2003, its 51 security updates, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2005 SP1, and Deltek Vision 4.1 with all its service packs, and we have a multi-megabit fibre connection to the Internet. Online update sites are great, but man would it be nice to have been able to pull all that patch stuff locally so I could apply it from a local server.

Once we have this VM built, we shoud be able to isolate our problem with Deltek Vision and the TEMPDB in SQL Server down to either our production hardware, the production VM, or something to do with VMware Server. In all three of those cases, there will be a path forward for our production rollout.