Moving ArcGIS to VMware Fusion | Christian Spanring

After the upgrade to Mac OS 10.5 I decided not to use Boot Camp any longer and switch entirely to a virtualization solution. Mainly because Boot Camp is limited to the primary (internal) hard drive and occupies a lot of disk space which I want to use for some other things now. A virtual machine I can run from an external hard drive too and move it to wherever I want.

My copy of Parallels Desktop (aff link) transfered the existing Windows XP installation from the Boot Camp partition to a new virtual disk image flawlessly. Problems started later when I tried to start the image for the 2nd time. The disk image apparently corrupted and I had to install everything from scratch again. After hours of Windows and ArcGIS installations, the disk image corrupted again when I tried to restart the virtual machine. I wasn’t able to find out what caused the problem, wasn’t in the mood to spend another couple of hours with basic set ups either and started looking for alternative virtualization solutions.

The next version of Parallels Desktop’s main competitor, VMware Fusion (aff link), is currently in beta and until 2nd Oct 2008 they are offering free beta licenses.

Their website lists all new features and enhancements. From my point of view – not doing any benchmarks, just trying to complete basic ArcGIS tasks in Windows – it feels snappy enough and has useful features like unity mode, snapshots, mirrored and shared folders, which you can add to the virtual machine while it’s running.

I didn’t encounter any problems setting up and running ArcGIS in VMware Fusion. Whereas I didn’t do any geoprocessing tasks yet. Geoprocessing worked well in Parallels and I expect it to do so in VMware Fusion too. If not, I’ll post it here.

However, while working with grids I noticed an issue: my ArcGIS workspace was a subfolder within the mirrored Documents directory in Mac OS X. In that environment, an ESRI grid file I was working with wasn’t fully accessible in ArcGIS. After I copied the entire workspace inside the virtual machine, everything worked fine again. Maybe it’s related to HFS, the Mac OS filesystem.

Steven and Roman brought my attention to Sun’s open source virtualization solution called Virtualbox. I tried that one too – it does a fairly good job, not as advanced as VMware Fusion though, but well documented and highly customizable. If you own a Mac, need Windows (or Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and prefer open source, go with VirtualBox.

Another interesting detail is that VMware Fusion is pretty active on Twitter. At least they are scanning Twitter for Tweets about their products and they even respond to those tweets – clever marketing I guess. Though I don’t how far it goes and if you can use Twitter for quick support questions. Would be very convenient.

Matt

Did it work well enough to use it everyday without any problems. Just wondering because the place I work at uses Mac so I was thinking about buying one for Autocad/GIS and wanted to know if this would work well enough.
http://spanring.eu/ Christian

Plugged to a bigger screen and with 2GB memory it works well, even though more memory wouldn’t hurt. But I’m not doing 3D in ArcGIS, just some geoprocessing and regular map productions.
SN271

I still cannot get a few extensions to work properly in Fusion, Military Analyst for example.

Parallels supports all of my work extensions without problem, both in ArcGIS 9.2, 9.3 and Erdas Imagine as well.

I’ve noticed that BootCamp is definitely faster than either Virtual platform, based upon GIS oriented benchmarks such as timed batch reprojections in Erdas imagine.

Have you encountered any issues with your extensions?
http://spanring.eu/ Christian

No problems so far, but I’m not using the Military Analyst. Last week I did many raster calculations (geoprocessing with model builder, resulting in a 1GB feature+raster geodatabase) and everything worked fine here. I’m sure it would be faster in Boot Camp, but VMware does a decent job for my use cases.
SN271

That’s good news indeed.

A colleague of mine is hell bent on using BootCamp but I’d rather stick with a VM environment if I can simply because of the ability to snapshot in case things go pear shaped. This also easily allows me to archive large work orders by creating a snapshot for each one.
Elizabeth

Have any of you ArcGIS users heard from anyone running Mapinfo with VMware? I am running VMware Fusion with Mapinfo 9, Discover 10.0, and Discover 3D 4.0. It’s pretty unstable in general, although I haven’t had any problems with speed in 3D. If anyone else is trying this, I’d be curious to know if you’ve gotten your custom LUT files to plot when displaying downhole data in Discover. Mine don’t appear although the files are stored in the VMware C drive as you would for a Windows platform, and I’m wondering if somehow Discover can’t find them? Are there similar file path issues with ArcGIS?
http://spanring.eu/ Christian

The only problems I had were working with raster files stored at the mac-formatted hard disk. Once I moved them to a DOS formatted external drive, where my vmware image is saved too, everything worked fine again. With ArcGIS itself I haven’t had experienced any unusual issues yet.
http://www.jeffcad.info jeffCad

It is not incredibly useful in an immediate sense, but i recently read that Autodesk is working with apple to come up with a more direct facilitation of AutoCAD on Mac.. Still not quite a discussion of native – just a patch of sorts for parallels.