Comments on: Moving ArcGIS to VMware Fusion

By: jeffCad

jeffCad — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 03:14:16 +0000

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.

By: Christian

Christian — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:03:31 +0000

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.

By: Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 06:48:34 +0000

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?

By: SN271

SN271 — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 11:50:33 +0000

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.

By: Christian

Christian — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 07:23:28 +0000

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.

By: SN271

SN271 — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 18:27:34 +0000

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?

By: Christian

Christian — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:49:58 +0000

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.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 04:47:47 +0000

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.