#virtual_machines

I received an email from a reader asking about how I set up my Macbook Pro for use with Windows virtual machines, today. He was specifically looking for tips and any gotcha's that I've run into. I hope you don't mind me reposting your email here. :)

Just about to buy my first mac.  I want to make sure I can set things up properly.  I will probably be buying a unit with an internal hard drive and then separately, optibay and a 512 GB ssd.  I want to make the SSD the internal boot drive and move the 500GB SATA drive over to the Optibay. Then I would want to be able to boot ot OSX but use parallels to run 64-biit WIndows 7 and Visual Studio etc.  I couldn't tell from your postings over on another site (forget wich one) whether you have had any experience with parallels in your optibay configured machine.  But I'm wondering if you have any thoughts for me.  Any gotchas you've experiencced with the Optibay?

In general my experience has been great. I've loved having a MacbookPro and an Optibay. My reply was rather lengthy, though, as I tend to ramble a bit and have difficult writing in a concise manner.

I thought it was worth posting my reply here in case anyone else was interested in my thoughts on the subjects.

I'm running basically the same setup that you described, except I'm using VMWare Fusion instead of Parallels. Most of the mac owners / developers I know use Parallels, though. I hear it's generally faster than VMWare Fusion and provides the same core functionality. I have a 15" Core i7 macbook pro with a Corsair P256 (no longer made / sold) SSD and the original 500GB sata drive in an optibay. I don't miss the superdrive at all. I've used it twice since I got the optibay, and the optibay came with an external USB case for the superdrive, which works perfectly - even for booting / installing OSX from dvd. :) The most difficult part of this will be replacing the superdrive with the optibay. You'll need several specialized screw driver bits to get everything taken apart, and you'll also need to be very comfortable working in tight spaces with several small parts that need to be moved around and disconnected / reconnected. If you've ever done any work on pc's or laptops, though, it shouldn't be a problem. I found the inside of the macbook pro I bought to be very well laid out and easy to know what everything is and where it all goes.

As for the screw drivers, I bought this set at a local pc hardware store: http://www.amazon.com/PLATINUM-TOOLS-19103-MICRO-SCREW/dp/B002PIAA9Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1296845094&sr=8-1 it has everything you'll need to open the macbook and move things around. For the SSD - buy the largest SSD with the best performance that you can afford, and don't buy an SSD from Apple. I'm not sure what the best SSDs are these days, but Corsair makes some great ones, the Intel X-25M series is great, and I think I heard that Crucial is making some good ones, as well. Do some good research before buying one. They're expensive and you want to make sure you know what you're getting for the money. If you plan on running more thane on virtual machine, you will want to max out the ram in your mbp. I started with 4GB and was able to run a Win7 vm without issue. But when I needed more than one VM open at the same time, the machine started crawling and became sluggish and unresponsive at times. I upgraded to 8GB of ram earlier this week and I haven't noticed any performance issues, yet, even with 3 vm's open. From the software side of things... nothing to say, really. It all just works, which is why I love my mac so much. :) even before I was doing full time rails work, when I was doing full time C# on my mac for a year, it was the best windows machine i had ever owned. I guess there is one thing to mention for the software side: if you need the raw power of running windows as the primary operating system on the mac, use Bootcamp. However, don't believe the hype about being able to use Parallels or Fusion to run your bootcamp partition as a virtual machine. Yes, it technically works, but it's horribly slow and any customization you do to the drive configuration when you are in bootcamp will cause problems when running as a VM. I learned this the hard way... it's not fun trying to figure out why things don't work when trying to use a bootcamp partition as a vm. That's my $0.02 worth of experience with bootcamp, at least.