Installing Lotus Connections

I am interested in learning Lotus Connections so i was trying to install it on in a VM on my laptop for last few days and finally i was able to install it yesterday, these are few things that i learned.

• Initially i thought i will install Lotus Connections 2.5 pilot and i ended up spending 2 days install it but i could not get it working after installation when i tried starting it i could see lots of exceptions being thrown


• Then i decided to install Lotus Connections 3.0 and since there is no concept of pilot in Lotus Connections 3.0, i had to install Lotus Connections 3.0 - Small deployment


• In order to install Lotus Connections 3.0, i had to install WAS with HTTP server and plug-in, DB2 database, Tivoli Directory integrator and Tivoli Directory server. I installed everything on one VM image except Tivoli directory server(I have a VM with LDAP on it that i use as user repository for my portal, WAS,...)


• In my first attempt my VM had 12 GB free disk space on VM but thats not sufficient, i could see that the DB2 directory growing to more than 5 GB during install, so i had to give up the VM at the end since install ran out of space


• In my last attempt which actually worked, i created a Windows XP SP 2 VM image with 3 GB RAM and 70 GB Hard disk(I can see the installed software + database takes 15-20 GB disk space) and now when i start the connections server it takes more than 2.5 GB RAM(on Windows XP you have limit of 3 GB)


• Other thing that i learned is you should follow the Install procedure as it is, normally i dont install HTTP server or Plugins in my development machine to save space and memory but when i try to start the server without HTTP server i get some weird error may be i will have to configure it to work without HTTP server

Once the connections server is started it is responsive