Well, after leaving the vCentre4 to boil, and reduce down

For the last few hours. All the services are running, but it is horrendously slow. And Update Manager is still not available to the VI Client. I get an error, and then the Update Manager plug in is disabled, and I cannot re-enable it in the client.

So the separate SQL 2005 server experiment continues - although sadly (due to client work - the stuff that lets me eat :)) means there'll only be a few evening hours in the next few days.
More news as it comes!

Update 1 - SQL Server left to install and patch, and taking it's *&^%^% time.  Hopefully finish off tomorrow and report back then