How to run the Technical Preview of Power BI Reports in SQL Server Reporting Services on-prem using Hyper-V

What a week!  With the announcement and release this week of the Technical Preview of SQL Server Reporting Services in Microsoft Azure, it’s been a whirlwind of activity and excitement.  And while people have generally been excited to go ahead and spin it up in Azure, there are still some folks who’d like to try out the preview on their local PC using Hyper-V.  Here’s how you can do just that.  I’ll also point out one big “gotcha” that I ran into doing it this way –

1.  Go through all the initial steps outlined in this blog post to get the machine up and running in your Microsoft Azure account.

2.  In Azure, find the Virtual Machine you just created and stop it by clicking the stop button.

3.  Now, navigate to the resource group you created that contains the virtual machine.  You’ll see it setup several items, including two storage accounts.  Select the storage account that has “vhd” in the lengthy name, as this is where the virtual hard drives are stored.

4.  As you click into the storage account details, you’ll see two disk drives – one is labelled “dataDisk.vhd”, and the other is labelled “osdiskforwindowssimple.vhd”.  “osdiskforwindowssimple.vhd” is the one you need to download.

5.  You now have a couple options – you can simply click the download button that appears when you select the vhd, or you can use a separate program that may help accelerate the download process (remember, the file is quite large).  These (free!) options include –

– Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer
– Azure Explorer from RedGate
– AzCopy (advanced users only)

No matter which way you download it, the file will take awhile depending on your internet connection since it is 127 GB.  You might consider letting it run overnight like I did.

6.  Once your download is finished, you’ll need to setup a new virtual machine in Hyper-V to mount the virtual hard drive on.  This also means you need to have Hyper-V turned on in Windows.  With Windows 10, just follow the instructions in this walkthrough to do so.  If you have Windows 7, you can follow these instructions instead.

7.  Launch Hyper-V Manager on your PC to get started.  Select New Virtual Machine

I’d recommend you name this new machine the same name you gave it in Azure, just for consistencies sake.  It isn’t required, but you might find it less confusing.  Hit Next

Choose “Generation 1” for this virtual machine.  Hit Next

You need to assign the amount of memory you’d like to make available to this virtual machine.  I’d strongly recommend assigning a minimum of 4 GB of memory to the virtual machine (remember, the machine we recommend in Azure has 28GB of memory), and really 8 GB (or more) is preferred.

For the purposes of this blog post, I am not going to assign a virtual network option for the machine.  This means I can’t access the internet from the VM (so Bing Maps won’t work if I choose a map visual), but I’m doing that to show you that yes, it can run entirely on-premises with no cloud dependencies.

Finally, I’ll select the virtual hard disk I downloaded from Azure to attach to the machine.

I’ll hit finish, and my new VM will show up in my list of virtual machines in Hyper-V manager.

8.  Here’s where the big “gotcha” is/was – if you right-click on the VM and hit “Start”, it will attempt to start and then fail with an error message saying “The Version Does Not Support This Version of the File Format” or something to that effect.  The issue is related to the fact we didn’t dismount the hard drive from the Azure VM (which I didn’t want to do, because I wanted to spin it back up again in the future in Azure).  To workaround this, you need to have Windows unmark the .vhd as a sparse file.  There are several ways you could accomplish this, but the easiest I found was with a program called Far Manager, which is free to download and use.

Once you’ve installed it, open the program and click on the “n” in the upper left-hand corner (don’t be scared of the GUI, it’s easy, trust me).

A window will pop-up showing all of your local hard drives – browse to the drive you vhd is on.

Select the vhd from the file list and hit ctrl-A.  A new menu will pop-up and you’ll see a box marked “Sparse”.  Uncheck that box and the click { Set }

It’ll take awhile to finish doing that (10-15 minutes in my case), but once it’s done, go ahead and try starting your virtual machine again.  You won’t get that nasty error any longer.

9.  It’ll take a few minutes to boot up and finish prepping.  When it’s finished, you can login with the administrator username and password you used when first creating the VM.  You’ll now be using Power BI Reports in Reporting Services entirely on-prem.

I’ll be back tomorrow with some tips and tricks you might not be aware to help you get the most out of this technical preview.  Until then, have a great Saturday!