Installing Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Refresh 4 on Windows 7/Vista

Microsoft has released yet another wonderful VPC that showcases the entire stack of Microsoft products working with Dynamics AX 2009 (Can be found HERE with PartnerSource/CustomerSource).  Unfortunately...microsoft says:

This virtual machine is configured for Windows 2008 Hyper-V and can’t be used with VPC (or Windows 7 Virtualization)

You can get Refresh 3.5 to work as a VPC...but I'm going to show you a neat way to get Refresh 4 running as a dual bootable Dev environment.

This HowTo assumes you have downloaded Refresh 4 and extracted it and you have AX5-W8R2-01.vhd and AX5-W8R2-01_DB.vhd available.

Start by right clicking on computer and clicking "manage".

Go to Storage>Disk Management, then click the action menu at the top and click "Attach VHD".  Attach both VHDs.  You will need the AX5-W8R2-01_DB.vhd to be the F: drive, or once you mount it, you will need to copy over the files and file structure to the F: drive of your machine.  This is because this SQL instance looks for its database on the F: drive.

After you've added these, all you need to do is create a boot entry to boot the VHD's.  This can be done with the command line tool BCDboot.  If your Windows partition of the VHD is now on the E: drive for example, you just need to type from an elevated command prompt:

>bcdboot E:\windows

This will add a boot entry.  To see your work, just run "msconfig" and click the boot tab.  There you can set the default OS you'd like to boot, the wait time (I changed mine to 5 seconds), etc.

All that's left to do is restart the machine and make sure you select the Server 2008 R2 instance.  Expect the following:

• First boot will be slow because all of the drivers are trying to sync to your new hardware
• This means your desktop might not show up for several minutes
• Page file issues initially (not sure why these occur, but I just ignore)
• Some drivers you might have to manually download and install specific to your machine.  The only one I had to install was my graphics driver so that it would detect my two monitors.

This is nice because Refresh 4 requires a good amount of horsepower to run (recommended min of 4GB memory, dual CPU), and you can devote your entire machine to it.  Also dual monitors, etc feel nicer when it's not in a VPC window.

Happy DAX'ing!