I used to be a pretty technical guy.  In a former life, I was an performance tuned SQL queries for Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2, and was briefly a Unix system administrator.

That means when I get a rare chance to do some fun technical stuff, I tend to dive in head first.  And not read manuals.  And learn hard lessons.

So it was when I started getting my environment setup for an upcoming CRS 2008 V1 webinar for ASUG with my friend George Peck from the Ablaze group.  (You have registered, right?)

My environment: Windows Server 2008 x86, SQL Server 2008, IIS6, Crystal Reports Server 2008 V1, IE7.  All fresh installs within in a VMWare Workstation v6.

For your benefit, here's what I learned:

1) When installing SQL Server 2008, into a VMWare virtual machine, it has to be physically copied onto your VM.  You cannot run the SQL Server 2008 setup.exe by referencing it through a shared folder.  The default shared folder name is \\.host\FolderName, so I'm guessing that something about the \\.host reference in the path that screws up the SQL Server installation.

2) Before installing CR Server, if you want to take advantage of the IIS support, you must go to the server manager and activate the Web Server (IIS) role, including ASP.NET.  ASP.NET support is not enabled by default when you turn on the Web Server role.  This fairly obvious oversight cost me an uninstall/reinstall of CRS 2008.

3) Perhaps most aggravating is IE 7 protected mode.  After pushing through the above issues, completing 2 CRS installs (the first one had to be rolled back because I didn't enable ASP.NET on IIS - duh), this was my reward:

A nice, blank logon screen.  I was just doing testing with the local IE7 browser within Windows Server 2008.

When I tried the CMC, the entire page was blank.

On a whim, I started fooling around with the IE7 settings.  When I added my server name to the list of Trusted Sites in the IE7 security settings, it worked!  I was able to logon and run the sample reports.

I hope this saves you some time when installing Crystal Reports Server 2008 V1.

Cheers, Blair