CRM 3.0 on SQL Server 2005

Interesting
post
by Russell Seymour about the difficulties he was having getting Microsoft
CRM 3.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 running on the same box. I agree, this is a
non trivial task, especially when you start looking at all the prerequisites CRM 3.0
has; including access to Active Directory and Exchange.

Russell’s difficulty stemmed from the fact that he was trying to build a VM with both
CRM and SQL Server running on it. This is fine if you’re building a development environment
for a single developer or if you want to set up a demo machine. His difficulty stemmed
from the fact both products assume you’re using different versions of the .Net framework
so getting them both to work side-by-side is trickier than you would think.

The good news is that in a real project, you probably wouldn’t deploy both SQL Server
and CRM on the same box due to scaling and resilience considerations; so this problem
probably wouldn’t manifest itself in a large scale deployment. However when you speak
to clients nowadays, it’s hard to avoid the perception that all Microsoft products
will work together with no conflicts or problems. They’re from the same supplier,
right? If I buy a laptop from Dell and
then buy RAM for it from Dell, I would
expect the two to work together without any problems. Microsoft certainly don’t do
anything to dispell this myth, however if anyone out there has ever tried to deploy
any of Microsoft’s “Enterprise” software, like Microsoft BizTalk or Microsoft CRM
3.0 on a consolidated environment, you’ll know what I’m talking about!

Rant over … for now …

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