VM Normal Way vs Off Bootcamp POLL

[arbi]

I'd like to get a rough idea what percentage of people run their VM off the bootcamp. And of those people, what percentage of the people alternate between booting the "bootcamp vm" from osx and booting natively in the bootcamp itself. I guess the only way to find out is a "poll".

A ) Normal way (not VMing off bootcamp)

B ) VM in OSX off the bootcamp only

C ) VM in OSX off the bootcamp AND booting natively from the bootcamp occasionally.

D ) VM in OSX (file based) and an independent bootcamp install

(or post your own unique situation, if there is any)

I'd like to do "C" when I get my MBP next week. But if it's a rather rare thing to do, then maybe I won't do it for stability/reliability reasons.

Please participate until the thread has a reasonable/meaningful amount of stats.

Edit: added option D due to asatoran's post

[rcardona2k]

I've used Fusion since v1 before using the Boot Camp paritition was possible, then I had Vista x86 Enterprise in Boot Camp for ages thinking i would need it for native graphics or synching with some physical devices. I never used it except to update and Vista ate off the free space applying updates, sigh (bad os!).

As Fusion has matured, I dumped the Boot Camp partition, moved to a newer MacBook Pro with a larger drive in favor of two file-based VMs: XP SP3 and Win7 x64 and I'm very happy. Devices that previously would not sync now do like an old Blackberry and a Polar IR watch but I sync these very rarely. Given the trade-offs and for how I use Windows (mostly VPN and Remote Desktop with some minor Visual Studio work), a native Fusion VM is the best way to go.

[arbi]

Thanks for your insight. Besides losing the ability for snapshots and suspend, do you see any other significant disadvantage to using the VM off bootcamp? My main concern is that if the VM might cause settings changes so that when I boot my win7 natively through BC that it will run in some sort of unoptimized state. ie. graphical settings like variables for directx/3d which would be detrimental for, say, gaming.

I am going to have a bootcamp installation of win7 regardless. The only question or decision that I have to make is whether or not I should share the same BC installation with the VM, or if I should make the BC win7 a completely independent installation from another file based VM install within osx. And of course that would mean I would have to buy 2 retail keys instead of 1 (since I don't have VLK, at least not yet for my company).

[rcardona2k]

>Besides losing the ability for snapshots and suspend, do you see any other significant disadvantage to using the VM off bootcamp?

You mentioned VLK, so for most people the initial Windows Activation hassle leaves a bad taste, i.e. doing it in the right order, adding the Tools and re-activating. Other upgrades/changes sometimes triggers re-activation needing to repeat. This this doesn't apply to just Windows, Adobe products have the same (re-)activation issue. I think Office activation is managed by VMware now (not sure), all my software is Enterprise, VLK or MSDN-licensed.

You might want to benchmark disk I/O, the earlier Boot Camp process for handling IO off the local partition did not perform as well as File IO in OS X which always surprises me. I mean the impact was like 10-15%, which is noticeable. Since I long since dumped Boot Camp, this may be out of date and I will edit this out if it's no longer the case.

Edit: I did remember that OS reinstalls or upgrades in BC can be an issue for Fusion, e.g. XP > Vista or Vista > Win7 in that the upgraded guest looks 'different' to Fusion on the next boot. Seems like it would be easy enough to change the guest OS setting for the Boot Camp paritition to whatever you changed your guest to but remember Fusion makes some changes to the Boot Camp OS on initial discovery. The remedy isn't too bad, it's just deleting the placeholder Boot Camp VM definition so Fusion can change whatever settings it needs to on the re-installed/upgraded guest. This is obviously a corner-case scenario but worth calling out now that Win7 is out and upgrade is a path some users choose.

Edit 2: More possible disadvantages are backups. Fusion-created VMs are files that can be backed up like any other files. Whereas backing up Boot Camp requires something like WinClone or an in-guest backup solution. And although infrequent, migrating to newer Macs requires moving your Boot Camp partition separately, again probably with WinClone.

Outside of these factors and reserving space for Boot Camp and then having other VMs, there's nothing bad with having a BC partition around. :smileyhappy:

[asatoran]

Thanks for your insight. Besides losing the ability for snapshots and suspend, do you see any other significant disadvantage to using the VM off bootcamp? My main concern is that if the VM might cause settings changes so that when I boot my win7 natively through BC that it will run in some sort of unoptimized state. ie. graphical settings like variables for directx/3d which would be detrimental for, say, gaming.

I am going to have a bootcamp installation of win7 regardless. The only question or decision that I have to make is whether or not I should share the same BC installation with the VM, or if I should make the BC win7 a completely independent installation from another file based VM install within osx. And of course that would mean I would have to buy 2 retail keys instead of 1 (since I don't have VLK, at least not yet for my company).

Me personally, the only reason I have a BC partition is to demo what BC is and how it differs from a virtual machine. Well, there is one other reason now and that is to test Windows 7 XP Mode, which doesn't work within a VM. But other than that, I'm not much of a gamer so I don't have much need for BC. The few games I do play, I leave on a dedicated PC (SimCity4) or have the Mac version (Spore.)

Another reason I run a separate BC copy of Windows is that I have an Microsoft Action Pack subscription, so have multiple Windows licenses. They still get caught in the reactivation, just like a retail license, so a volume license would be easier if you were going to use the BC partition as a VM. But the cost of Action Pack is quite a bargain, if you can live with the requirements (e.g.: assesments.)

So for you poll, I use "D", two separate instances of Windows, since I have the licenses, so don't have to worry about reactivation issues.

[blurk]

A) Normal VM, not off Bootcamp.

I've simply never bothered with a Bootcamp partition because virtualisation is good enough for my needs, and many years past I used to do a lot of dual-booting (Windows vs OS/2, Windows vs Linux) and quite frankly dual booting was a pain to deal with (I like keeping my working "state" active for a long time, and so tend to prefer keeping machines running and not rebooting them frequently). Also, I run several specialised VMs so again having a Bootcamp partition is of no significant use to me.