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Developing .NET on a 2011 MacBook Pro via Windows 7 VMWare Fusion Virtual Machine

I can't seem to find a duplicate question, so please excuse (and redirect) me if this question has already been asked.

I just recently got a 2011 MBP. I am a .NET developer, and as such, am totally reliant on Visual Studio 2010, IIS 7.5, SQL Server 2008 R2, etc. I would like to be able to run Windows 7 on my MacBook as a VM, and avoid running bootcamp if possible (I have done this for years and would like to try another way).

I am planning on installing 8 GB of RAM and also swapping my superdrive for an SSD using either an OptiBay or an OWC Data Doubler. I am thinking I can get some nice performance with the VM if it is located on the SSD. I have heard that it is good practice to have a VM on a separate drive as the host OS, so I plan on leaving OSX installed on the HDD that came with the computer.

Has anyone tried this? I am very curious what your results have been. I have Googled with a gajillion different search term combinations, but haven't found anyone's personal experience doing this. Again, if you've done this, please let me know if the VM ever came close to performing as well as it would if running natively on an HDD. And if this idea of mine is stupid, or there is a better way to use the SSD, educate me!

Thanks!

20110607 - This post also has some good relevant information: VMWare Fusion - Which runs better, Windows 7 vs XP? 32bit or 64bit?. I'm still waiting on the SSD, etc.... I'll update this post with my experience then.

20110711 - I installed the SSD! I moved all but my users folder in OSX to the SSD, and I am also hosting the Windows 7 VM on the SSD as well. Still have 60 GB of the 115 GB left on the SSD, so looking good space wise. Performance? Here are the raw numbers.... (I am quite pleased with real-life performance):

Windows 7 Experience Index (VM configured with 2 CPUs and 4GB RAM):

• Processor: 7.3
• Memory (RAM): 7.9
• Graphics: 5.9
• Gaming Graphics: 5.3
• Primary Hard Disks: 7.9!

OSX Snow Leopard XBench Score (while the Windows 7 VM is running):

• Results: 313.12
• CPU Test: 207.48
• Thread Test: 795.15
• Memory Test: 522.65
• Quartz Graphics Test: 275.75
• OpenGL Graphics Test: 206.00
• User Interface Test: 464.63
• Disk Test: 267.94! (up from 55.54 with the stock 5400 RPM HDD)

OSX Snow Leopard XBench Score (while the Windows 7 VM is shut down):

• Results: 319.76
• CPU Test: 218.13
• Thread Test: 802.30
• Memory Test: 546.90
• Quartz Graphics Test: 300.34
• OpenGL Graphics Test: 204.10
• User Interface Test: 451.10
• Disk Test: 264.10

So essentially, aside from merely respectable graphics performance, this machine is lightning fast. My OSX boots to functional in under 20s. OSX loads apps usually in one bounce, even Word 2011, Photoshop CS5, Lightroom, iTunes (with a 60GB library); and the apps are functional immediately after they appear. Windows 7 via the VM boots to functional in less than 30s. SQL Server loads completely in 2-3s, Visual Studio does the same, and loading/rebuilding large (~20 projects in a solution) solutions takes about 12-15s.

I am very pleased, especially with the level of performance in the VM, which lets me use OSX for communication, image editing, public internet browsing, etc, while using the VM solely for writing code and sql. I get to use spaces to mitigate the single-screen problem, and if I want to acces some of my life stuff, well hey -- I'm in OSX, it's all right there. Big bonus too is that I can test the sites hosted locally in IIS on the VM from my mac browsers, which feels like magic to me (use Bridged networking, open port 80 in Windows Firewall, use ipconfig to get the local IP of the VM, and add a corresponding entry in /etc/hosts in OSX). I love it.

Hope this info helps someone who's thinking of doing something similar!

How do I install VMware player on a Mac os X?

I went to their site, and downloaded a .bundle which automagically turned into a .txt file after downloading.

Long story short, I can't run the txt file because I guess Mountain Lion Mac os X isn't a strict Linux box and is missing some core components to do that type of installation.

Does anyone know how to install VMware?

How can I simulate a slow machine in a VM?

I'm testing an AJAX-heavy web-application. I develop on a new Mac, but I use VmWare Fusion (currently 3.1.2) to test in Windows XP, using IETester to simulate older versions of IE.

This lets me see how older IE versions would render the site, but I'd also like to see how the site would perform on an older machine. I see in the VM's settings that I can decrease the RAM; is there a way to also dial down the processor speed? How else might I simulate a slow machine?

(I am also going to check out how to simulate a slow internet connection.)

OSX 10.10 Yosemite slow on VMware

I was having OSX Mavericks 10.9 in Vmware. It was working fine with VMware Tools installed and SVGA Drivers also. When Yosemite released, I updated it from App Store. I cam across many problems on this update.

1. Graphics are very bad
2. It is too much slow

What i tried:

1. I updated latest VMware tools from VMware site
2. Tried to install SVGA drivers again (could not find update for OSX Yosemite SVGA drivers here. These drivers were working well with Mavericks and made it blazing fast in vmware in my previous experience)
3. Rpaired file and folder permissions both using Mac OS X's internal utility and using CCleaner application also.
4. Cleaned all junk files (e.g. temp files) using CCleaner

5. Tried to increase Virtual Graphics Memory size using configuration file of Virtual Machine and adding this line to it

   svga.vramSize = "sizeInBytes"

6. Came across a link on internet link here. It suggested to run application called BeamOff (download link available on same site) and add it to startup to disable Beam Sync feature of Mac to improve graphics

By using option 6 mentioned above, when i launched BeamOff application, it suddenly made graphics smoother. So i added it to login item so that it may start with login of Mac. But to my disappointment, this improvement in performance (graphics + speed etc) was not too much great as i was having when using OS X Mavericks.

My Virtual machine is having:

• RAM: 3GB
• HDD Space: 150 GB

What is problem/ What is want:

1.Speedup OS X Yosemite performance (graphics + speed) as i was having before in Mavericks
2. I am having resolution of 1366*768 but When i am at login screen of Mavericks, i am not having this resolution (some black margins from left and right, looks like 1024*768). It changes to 1366*768 resolution after login process is complete and desktop is loaded. Please note it was working fine when i was having Mavericks (have 1366*768 resolution at login screen and desktop both).

Getting an error trying to set up shared folders on an Ubuntu instance of VMWare Fusion running on OSX

Receiving the following error:

Unable to update runtime folder sharing status: There was an error mounting Shared Folders file system inside the guest operating system.

Running VMWare Fusion 5.0.2 on OS X 10.6.8, guest OS is Ubuntu 12.10 with VMware Tools installed.

Have been unable to get to /mnt/hgfs at all, /mnt/ directory is blank. Turned Shared Folders off and then on in VMWare Fusion and received the above error.

Any thoughts what to do to fix this?

Parallels vs Vmware Fusion for running Windows on Mac OS X

Has anyone used both of these? Is one clearly superior to the other? I notice they are the same price. Any pros and cons?

How do I convert a .vhd disk image to work with VMWare Fusion 2?

I’ve just installed VMWare Fusion 2 on my Mac.

Microsoft makes available some Virtual PC disk images containing different versions of IE, so that us humble web developers can test our code on them:

• http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en

I want to convert these .vhd files to work with VMWare Fusion 2.

Note: VMWare Fusion 3 can import .vhd files natively (File > Import). This works just fine on the Microsoft IE compatibility VMs.

I’ve tried VMWare Converter Standalone on Windows, but it doesn’t work with .vhd files (as of the current version, 4.0.1).

Any ideas? VMWare’s website is confused corporate hell.

Visual Studio: significant performance difference on VMware Fusion vs Bootcamp?

I've just purchased a new MacBook Pro and was looking at installing Windows 7 via Bootcamp, so that i can do Visual Studio development work, but i was thinking it would make more sense to move my non development stuff (email etc) to the Mac and launch Windows 7 via VMWare Fusion. Im also looking at doing iPhone development as well so was wondering if that made more sense?

Has any one had any experience in or run into problems developing in Visual Studio 2008/2010 beta on Windows 2007 (64 or 32 bit) running on VMWare Fusion? Or is the performance that much worse that a dual boot option is the better way to go?

Windows 8.1 VM Thinks it's on a Touchscreen

I'm running Win 8.1 on an OS X system via VMware Fusion. I frequently get the "helpful" tips to swipe from here or there to do this or that, which of course I can't do. In addition, many sites force IE into mobile modes because it is delivering the wrong user agent.

I saw this post regarding the EdgeUI tips issue, but I'm wondering if that really isn't just a workaround to actually fixing the problem. Do you desktop users of 8.1 (non-virtualized) honestly get those messages?

I know about user agent spoofing, but I really want to correct the native user agent string, and again, I'm thinking this is all a deeper-level fix than workarounds. Maybe not.

What is thnuclnt, vmware

After starting VMware, I noticed that there are more than 10 processes called 'thnuclnt'. They're listening on the port 4000. (Since i use this port for something else, it's annoying.)

I'm wondering what this is, since I didn’t find anything about it.

I use Mac 10.5.8 with VMware Fusion 2.0.2

How do I find the IP address of a virtual machine using VMware Fusion?

Can I determine the IP of a virtual machine using VMware Fusion without actually entering the operating system running on the virtual machine? I'm looking for a menu option, command line, or otherwise that I can issue against the virtual image with the VMware Fusion Software itself.

Thanks - Adron

VMware Fusion performance degrading after few hours

I've been having an issue with VMware Fusion for some time now, where the VM (running Windows) runs fine initially, but will slow down to a grind after some time (best guess is a couple of hours). It's so slow that there's even a delay when typing.

The issue is not restricted to one VM: I have multiple Windows 7 VMs showing the same problem.

Any hints would be greatly appreciated in locating the source of this issue. Below are the configuration details and what I've attempted so far.

Configuration:

• OS X 10.9.2
• VMware Fusion 6.0.2
• MacBook Pro (Mid 2012) Intel Core i7 2.3Ghz, 8GB RAM, Apple SSD
• VM running Windows 7, 8 cores, 4GB RAM, SATA disk (not preallocated)
• VM network: bridged

Changes (optimisations) performed so far

Windows (Guest):

• Disabled all non-essential Windows services (e.g. Windows Search, Media, …)
• Disabled NTFS access time modification
• Disabled 8.3 filenames
• Disabled Aero
• Configured performance setting to Best performance

Mac (Host):

• Disabled energy saving
• Disabled automatic switching of display adapter

VMware:

• Moved the VM from external USB3 disk to internal SSD
• VM compatibility set to VMware 6 (latest available)
• Upgraded VM HD controller from SCSI or IDE to SATA
• Set VM hard disk buffering to enabled
• Disabled Troubleshooting (set to None)
• Removed the appleListCache folder and replaced it with a dummy file

Update:

I created a support request with VMware to get to the bottom of this, and have received these two additional actions to try:

• Reinstall the VMware tools

• Exclude VMware from the AppNap feature in OSX by performing the following steps:

  1. Shutdown all Virtual Machines and quit Vmware Fusion.
  2. Go to Applications Folder and right click on VMware Fusion
  3. Select Get Info
  4. Select the option Prevent App Nap.
  5. Startup the Virtual Machine and recheck the issue.

Update 2:

In addition to the action above, VMware Support asked me to do the following:

• Lower the number of CPU cores assigned to the VM — My MacBook Pro has 8 cores, of which VMware suggested only assigning 2 to a VM.
• Lower the RAM assigned to the VM — I always assigned as much RAM as possible, leaving just enough for OSX. VMware suggested lowering this to 2GB.
• Disable the shared folder feature — I normally share a few folders between the host and guest OS for easy file exchange.

While I didn't expect these changes to make any difference (esp. lowering the resources assigned to the guest OS), the VM's I've tried so far have all run stable and without any real hiccups, even when run from the USB3 external WD disk.

Can you shrink the sparse disk image of a Mac OS X guest OS in VMWare Fusion?

I use VMWare Fusion on my Mac to run a virtual Windows 7 machine, and the Microsoft IE compatibility Windows XP virtual machines.

In VMWare Tools on the Windows guest OSes, there’s a “Shrink” option that lets you reduce the size of the sparse disk image used by the guest OS, to save hard drive space on your host OX.

I’ve recently created another virtual machine, this time running Snow Leopard Server. I was wondering if I could shrink the spare disk image used by this machine too, but I can’t find a VMWare Tools app on the Mac guest OS, even though VMWare Tools have been installed (as VMWare’s Shared Folders feature is working).

Is there any way to shrink the sparse disk image used by Mac OS X guest OSes in VMWare Fusion?

Boot Camp, Parallels, VirtualBox Or Fusion? [closed]

Boot Camp, Parallels, VirtualBox Or Fusion?

In a recent article on Australian LifeHacker.com they discussed the following question, I trust the SU group more then the anonymous answers from LifeHacker and I thought I would re-ask it here?

I’m sitting here with my MacBook Pro and a copy of Windows 7, wanting to combine the two into the ultimate blogging machine. But how to do it?

I could go the cheap option of Boot Camp, which only lets me boot one OS at a time, and is free. Or I could spring for a copy of Parallels or VMWare Fusion to do the whole virtual machine thing.

So the question today is which should I choose? Either because you want to know what the process is like, or because you recommend the solution – either one is fine by me.

EDIT: Work is paying too; so don't worry about price affecting your choice!

VMWare Fusion access guest vm (windows) from host (mac)

I am needing to access the localhost of a guest windows 8 vm from my Mac OS (10.9) host. The windows 8 vm is running in VMWare Fusion. How can I do this?
I have tried getting the guest ip address with ipconfig, and then typing that IP address into the browser on my mac, but it won't connect, and i can't ping that ip address from the mac either.
I have tried doing this in both NAT and Bridged networking modes in VMWare Fusion.