How to run AX 2012 HyperV on VirtualBox

In order to run the AX 2012 Beta VPC, it usually requires HyperV, or attaching the disk locally.  This is a great solution I was told about to run it locally.

http://dynamicsnavax.blogspot.com/2011/04/how-to-run-ax2012-hyperv-on-virtualbox.html

The basic idea is you just create a virtual machine, mount the three *.vhd's, and start it.  This blog post highlights two important caveats that you will come across.

1. If you use the "Create new virtual machine wizard" and check the box to use an existing disk, it defaults the VHD as a SATA controller, which will result in the attached blue screen error over and over.  You need to attach all three disks as IDE controllers
2. Sharepoint apparently doesn't work without adding to the hosts file

This is the blue screen I kept hitting over and over...very frustrating before seeing this blog post for the solution.

The AX 2012 VPC can be accessed here with PartnerSource/CustomerSource here:

• PartnerSource  https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/marketing/marketingcollateral/demos/AX2012DemoToolsMaterials.htm
• CustomerSource https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/downloads/servicepacks/AX2012DemoToolsMaterials.htm 

Enterprise portal security issues with Refresh 3.5 and AX 2009

I wanted to play around with a well-built demo environment so that I could experiment with some workflow ideas I had, so I downloaded Microsoft's Refresh 3.5 VPC from partnersource (located here).

I prefer to work as a typical user with typical security settings so that I can identify issues quickly.  After booting up the VPC and restarting it a few times so that it would adjust to my machine, there were quite a few changes I had to make to get it usable.

Firstly, I had to change the client configuration to point to AX593 and the business connector configuration as well.  If you forget the business connector, you will have EP issues, amongst other things.

I randomly chose contoso\Nancy as my testing user, and I immediately notice that I don't have access to EP at all:

So I switch back over to contoso\administrator to take a look at the security settings in EP and notice there really isn't anything setup:

Let's add Nancy to the viewer's group and see what happens...

So now we can at least see the role centers, but the KPIs are having an issue...hmm...this issue is typically related to Kerberos, but on the Refresh 3.5 VPC, it's only NTLM security because everything is on the same machine.

Let's remove Nancy from the viewers group, and just create our own "AX Users" group, but let's make it "Read" only instead of "View only", add Nancy to it, then refresh our role center:

And we're good.  The only difference between View Only and Read is the ability to view the source of documents with server-side file handlers.  See Sharepoint permissions matrix here for security differences.