Virtualization isn't just about running Windows applications on Mac hardware. It's about maximizing your computing investment by running multiple operating systems and applications simultaneously. Running virtualized operating systems also helps protect your host computing environment by isolating the virtual machines from the host machine and each other, which is great for testing new versions of software and isolating programming efforts (rather than risk testing on the host machine). In addition, virtualization takes full advantage of multicore environments.
A multicore processor is like having multiple computers in one PC. Running Revit on VMS means that when one computer-intensive task starts, you'll still be able to manage other tasks. For example, while rendering your project in one VM, you can create a family component in another, while saving your project to the central file on another VM—all at the same time.
Until recently, Autodesk didn't officially support running its applications in virtualization. But this changed in the fall of 2009 when official support was announced. Although most components of virtualization run at nearly full speed, emulated graphics for 3D-intensive applications are certainly a challenge for virtual environments. However, there have been some recent and exciting developments in this area that are removing even the most stringent barriers to adoption. In this chapter, you'll learn to:
Understand the benefits of virtualization
Take advantage of virtualization
Virtualization was originally pioneered more than 40 years ago by IBM in order to distribute costly mainframe resources and run multiple applications. At the time, computers were far too expensive to be tied up computing single tasks. Virtualization allowed the host computer to run many more "virtual" computers at the same time—duplicates of the host computer. Pretty cool!
Eventually the necessity and cost of maintaining expensive, distributed computing decreased, so eventually virtualization was no longer necessary. The decrease in mainframe computing coincided with advances in personal computers (PCs). And personal computing meant that end users finally had the ability to run both their operating system and their applications locally, right at their desk—on their personal computer. So, in some aspects, computing was becoming more and more "decentralized." Another viewpoint is that they've actually become "hyper-centralized," because nearly everyone has a computer right at their desk!
By today's standards, early PCs were quite primitive. "Top-of-the-line" personal computers came with a 60MHz processor and a 250MB hard drive. Only 15 years later, the phone in your pocket probably has a 400MHz processor (a more than 6 increase) and an 8GB hard drive (a more than 30 increase in capacity).
As for today's personal computing, processor speeds once measured in megahertz (MHz) are now measured in gigahertz (GHz), and single processing systems have given way to processors that may in turn contain multiple "cores." This means that a single processor system may be composed of two or more independent cores. And it's not uncommon to have computers with multiple processors. That's a lot of computing power. And in many cases, it's a lot of underused computing power.
Did you know that you might actually have a computer with multiple processors, each of which contains multiple cores? That means you effectively have many potential computing environments. For example, if your computer contains two quad-core processors, you potentially have eight simultaneous computing environments!
You're probably beginning to understand why virtualization is making a comeback. Those 40-year-old computing principles are being applied to personal computing. A multicore CPU will allow applications to run simultaneously and faster (within a single operating system). Virtualization allows multiple operating systems to run concurrently on the same computer.
This is because each VM is allocating the physical resources of the multiprocessor/core computer while "virtualizing" other physical hardware resources required by an operating system. So each virtualized session contains its very own operating system—Windows, Linux, and so on. And within those virtualized operating systems, multiple applications are able to operate.
A lot of great applications run in Windows, but some very industry-specific applications run in Linux. Others may only run in Mac OS X (which is Unix based). Virtualization allows you to create a fantastic best-of-breed solution, where you get to choose not only the application but also the operating system for that application.
Just imagine that not too long ago, radios were AM only, and then later FM, and eventually both AM and FM. Even the first TVs were VHF (channels 2–13) and then later UHF (channels 14–83) was added. But if you wanted AM and FM, or VHF and UHF, you had to buy two radios and two televisions! Well, that certainly seems unimaginable now. Yet now the same goes for personal computing. You no longer have to buy multiple computers to run multiple operating systems because you effectively already have multiple computers in your "one" computer. You're just not taking advantage of them!
Figure 23.1 illustrates this with four concurrent "spaces" in Mac OS X (which is being used as the host computer). In turn, this host computer is running two virtual machines. One of the VMs is of Windows XP, which is running Revit 2010 (upper right). The other VM is running Vista 64, which is running a beta of Revit 2011 (lower right). And at the same time, the upper and lower spaces on the left contain instant messaging sessions, email, web browser, and word processing applications (running on the host computer).
To get started with virtualization, you'll need a computer with multiprocessors (or a single processor with multiple cores). You'll also need to have enough memory to allocate to your host and your guest (or virtual) computers: 4GB of RAM will do nicely. How many real and virtual processors you have will help you determine how many computing environments can run simultaneously. For example, if you have four processing cores and 8GB of RAM (and you want to allocate each computer (real or virtual) at least 2GB of RAM, then you'll be able to run up to four computers at the same time (one host computer and three guest computers).
The host computer is the actual physical machine along with its operating system (OS). Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X may all operate as the host computer and operating system. In turn, the host computer will simply host the virtual OSs. And in turn those virtual operating systems will run their virtualized applications (this is the guest computer). Standard x86 hardware and Intel or AMD architecture may host virtual machines.
The guest computer is simply a virtual machine. The VM contains the virtual OS, applications, and even user files (like a document, spreadsheet, and so on) all contained in a single file.
The guest may reside on the same hard drive as the host machine. But the guest machine may also be stored (as well as backed up) on another hard drive or even external hard drive or other portable media.
Essentially, each VM exists as a separate, virtual disk image. And yet files on the host machine may be accessed by either the host or guest machine, or vice versa. For example, a Microsoft Word document residing on a host machine (running OS X) may be accessed, opened, and saved by a guest VM running Microsoft XP and Microsoft Office. And the guest VM may contain files accessed by the host machine. It's really quite flexible.
As a result, it's important to keep in mind that the files that you need to access within a VM (or guest machine) need not reside "inside" the VM. Your files may reside on the host machine or even at a location that can be accessed by either the host or the guest, such as a LAN or WAN network drive or even an external hard drive.
Basically, it's all about flexibility and being able to select a best-of-breed solution that suits your business and working style. Having to choose one "right" personal computer for work (or your family, for that matter) is a thing of the past. Instead, you can choose one right host'likely the one that suits a majority of your needs. Then you're free to virtualize the other operating systems and applications that you'll run from your host of choice.
From the standpoint of IT and end-user support issues, there are numerous advantages when allowing end users to utilize virtual environments. First, the rollout of approved disk images is greatly simplified (containing both OS and applications—and even user files and templates if necessary). Everything is self-contained in a single file. Rolling out prebuilt images of VMs can make new installations and upgrades easier, predictable, and far less time-consuming. Even installing operating systems in VMs takes far less time because you're writing the data to RAM.
Another advantage is that the entire OS and all required applications may be quickly restored. In the event of a corrupted hard drive (where the VM resides), a duplicate VM can be replaced in a matter of minutes rather than hours or days. Just copy the at-risk VM to a new hard drive as you would any other file. No reinstalling the OS, applications, user settings, and preferences, and so on—it's all already there in the VM.
If you are in the position of having to support legacy operating systems and applications, then virtualization is a no-brainer. Rather than having to maintain aging hardware, out-of-date operating systems, and legacy applications, you can simply emulate everything in a single file. This keeps your teams and project managers happy while you don't having to worry about maintaining or replacing aging equipment.
And if you've been in IT for only a short time, it doesn't take long to experience a first-person account of the unintended consequence of a rogue OS or software update or patch that completely ruined an otherwise useful computer! In these cases, two people (at least) are stuck: the person who was until a few moments ago being quite productive and the person who will have to troubleshoot the computer back into usefulness—in other words, you. Well, virtualized computer software and operating systems can be tested first in virtualization without the risk of impacting the host system.
Finally, networking and hardware connectivity and emulation may be completely isolated from the host machine. This allows for virus containment of the VM without risking the host machine or other virtual machines on the host. Just delete the suspect VM and restore from a backup (or roll the VM back to a previous state).
There are also numerous, compelling advantages for the end users running virtual machines. First, computing resources may be easily allocated to the guest OS and applications depending on specific requirements. Of course, 3D-centric applications will need more resources. But word processing and spreadsheets will require far less. Less hardware-demanding applications won't compete with operating systems and applications, which require more resources, and all of this can be defined within the settings of each VM.
Second, customized VMs and applications can be created for individual users quickly and easily. Of course, economies of scale often prevail in large organizations, where choosing the "right" hardware, OS, and applications is paramount. But with virtualization, you can define best-of-breed solutions for your associates and deploy them quickly and easily. This "mass customization" can go a long way toward employee satisfaction. And not only this, but in many cases, portability is also a key concern. So, it's important to keep in mind that a modest external hard drive can contain dozens of virtual machines. Let the end user choose the "computer" that's right for them. And if that computer fails, simply take the portable hard drive to another computer for minimal downtime.
End users may operate multiple VM simultaneously, which takes full advantage of multicore computing resources. Of course, the licensing of operating systems and applications is an important business concern. Yet, network licensing of operating systems and applications allows users to run multiple operating systems and applications at the same time while being fully compliant from a licensing standpoint. The virtual machines simply need to be able to access licenses from the network, which is not much different from how the host computer already operates.
Of course, every computer crashes, even virtual ones! But if an application or OS within a VM crashes, the host OS and remaining VMs are isolated. As a result, your host computer is typically not affected by a crash of the guest computer. The end user simply restarts the virtual machine and its applications.
But even when computers don't crash, it's still pretty easy to tell when they're "struggling" to complete one task before they allow you to start another. This is referred to the "white screen of death"—since your computer simply hangs with a white screen until it's done with whatever it was working on and ready to let you do something else.
When running processor- and memory-intensive applications and processes in virtualization, end users can quickly select another VM and continue working in another application and process, avoiding the dreaded "white screen of death." In other words, although Revit is saving to Central, or completing a rendering in a virtual machine, you're free to work in another virtual machine or the host computer while the task in the VM completes. Multitasking indeed!
And finally, not only will the end users be able to choose the best-of-breed operating system and applications, but as we've illustrated earlier, they'll also be able to run them concurrently! There's no rebooting between operating systems or other sessions. Nor will your end users need to keep multiple computers within arm's reach to multitask. It's all there in one single computer!
Just like any computer, there are practical limitations to running virtual computers. Depending on the application that you're running in virtualization, response times are going to be nearly as fast as running it natively—or significantly slower. Real-world experience indicates that bottlenecks in speed tend to occur in applications that are graphically intensive: video, video games, and 3D graphics.
From the standpoint of your host computer, it's important that each of your virtual machines have one (or more) processors preallocated to the virtual machine. This means that every time you start your VM, the host computer will dedicate a processor of your host computer to the VM.
Keep in mind that when your VM is opened, the entire computer—operating system, applications, files—will try to operate in RAM, rather than writing back and forth to your hard drive. So, how much memory you allocate to a VM is really important. But there is a point of "diminished returns" because the more memory that you allocate to the guest machine, the less will be available to the host machine. But since the host machine is responsible for running your virtualization software, the less memory available to your host machine will impact how efficiently your guest machine will run.
The file size being opened by your virtualized application (on your virtual machine) will also impact how efficiently your guest machine runs. Keep an eye on your virtualized task manager. As a rule of thumb, we suggest that you allocate at least 20x in memory of your opened Revit file. So if you have a file that is 100MB in size, you'll want to allocate at least 2GB in memory to that Revit file alone. But keep in mind that you also have the operating system and the application to consider.
Interestingly enough, virtual machines will run nearly as fast as if they were running natively as the host operating system. In some cases that require intensive reading and writing to the physical hard drive, your virtual machine may actually perform better than running on a host machine because in many cases it is faster to write data to RAM. So, where is the bottleneck we all keep reading about? Graphics.
Virtual machines do their best to emulate graphics cards, but just as the VM preallocates dedicated processing, there's no substitute for the "real" thing. Graphics emulation will get you close when it comes to most business applications (word processing, spreadsheets, and so on). But graphics-intensive applications will stress your virtual machine.
What is needed is dedicated graphics. In other words, just like the VM relies on a dedicated, physical processor, a virtual machine that is tasked with running graphically intensive applications could take advantage of dedicated graphics hardware. We'll talk about this later in the chapter when we discuss some exciting recent developments in virtualization.
There are two primary methods of creating a virtual machine. You can start from scratch and create a clean installation of your desired operating system (Figure 23.2), or if you already have a computer that you know you want to use, you can convert your physical computer to a virtual one.
If you want to start from scratch and create a clean installation of an operating system and applications, simply start your VM software and select File
Depending on the operating system, expect the VM to restart a few times during the process. But overall it should take significantly less time to create a VM than to install an operating system on a host computer. When the installation is complete, remember to check for recent updates to the operating system. We've found that downloading and installing these updates (which usually require the guest computer to reboot after install) can take as long to complete as the installation of the whole operating system.
What about network and Internet access on the VM? Unless you intend to completely isolate your guest computer from the network and Internet, it's a good idea to install virus protection software just as you would on any host computer. Fortunately, both VMware and Parallels offer subscriptions to virus protection software as part of the purchase of either virtual solution.
Keep in mind that after you've created your clean install (and installed any suggested critical updates), you may not want to start installing any applications right away. Why? Because you've just spent a fair amount of time creating a brand-new virtual computer! So, before you start spending a lot of time installing applications and moving files to your guest computer, why not create a copy for safekeeping? The original clean install will be updated from time to time through system updates. But the copy will be a starting point for installing your applications.
By creating a copy of your new guest computer, you'll have a great starting point for testing out new applications without risking the rest of your virtual environments. And when you're done testing a new application, simply delete the VM and copy a new one. In some cases, installing an application on a clean, duplicate guest computer is faster than going through the process of uninstalling an application and reinstalling it in the same VM.
In some cases, you don't want to spend the time to create a VM that is a duplicate of a physical machine, particularly if it means trying to re-create a physical machine that contains an operating system, numerous applications, and dozens of user-created files that has grown and evolved over time. Trying to exactly re-create such a physical computer would be nearly impossible, especially if the physical computer you're trying to duplicate is a work-issued desktop or laptop that contains applications and settings that you can't install or duplicate.
Fortunately, both Parallels and VMware have applications that allow you to turn your physical computer into a virtual computer, in effect migrating the entire computer into a VM. This is commonly referred to as physical-to-virtual (P2V) technology. The applications to complete the P2V migration are provided on a complimentary basis by the software vendors. Obviously it's in their interest to get you to give virtualization a try! Not only that, but both Parallels and VMware offer 30-day trials of their virtual solutions so you can create or convert a trial virtual computer.
To download Parallels Transporter, go here:
www.parallels.com/products/pvc45/technology/transporter/
To download VMware Converter, go here:
www.vmware.com/products/converter/
Once you've downloaded either (or both) P2V conversion solution, simply install the application, start it, and follow the on-screen directions. It's pretty straightforward, but it may take some time (up to a few hours), and while the conversion is taking place, it's best to not attempt to work on the host computer.
When the conversion is complete, you'll have a single file that is very close to the size of the used capacity of your physical computer. For example, if your physical computer's operating system, applications, files, settings, and so on take up 60GB of space on your hard drive, you'll have a 60GB file when the P2V conversion is complete. Therefore, it's important to have more free space on your hard drive than you're presently using before you start the conversion process. Or better yet, you can write the conversion (the creation of the virtual computer) to another hard drive, even an external hard drive.
Prepare yourself when you open this VM for the first time. Expect everything to look and feel the same as your physical computer. But the first time you launch your virtual machine, expect to be at least a little "giddy" when everything is just there and looks the same. All the settings, software, files—even the desktop—will look just like your physical computer, except now your physical computer may reside on an external hard drive that is no longer dependent on a specific location. Any computer that contains the virtual software is capable of running your virtual computer. So if your workstation or laptop is unavailable or in need of repair, you can still be up and running!
It's always interesting to us the reaction that virtualization gets from many suspecting individuals. If it's really that good, why haven't you heard about it before, right? Well, it's likely that your company is already using virtualization on the server side of your IT department. There are some advantages to running mission-critical applications on virtual machines (like your email server) so if one application fails, the rest of the server is not affected.
But virtualization is somewhat new on the end-user side. And although you might feel comfortable testing virtualization yourself or on a case-by-case basis, what about end-user virtualization in an enterprise environment?
At Autodesk University 2007, Peter Streibig and Phil Read presented "Running Revit in Virtualization." As you can imagine, a lot has changed since then. Both hardware and software have evolved—more memory allocation, multiple processors, and so on. So we've asked Peter to contribute to this book and update us on what's been going on in virtualization over the past two years. But first, some background information on the amazing design firm where Peter works.
Bohlin Cywinski Jackson
Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (BCJ) is the design firm behind such notable projects as the Pacific Rim Estate near Seattle; the Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California; and a series of high-profile stores for Apple Inc. that are located around the world. New York City's Fifth Avenue store is shown here.
The firm has received more than 350 regional, national, and international awards for design, including the Architecture Firm Award of the American Institute of Architects—the highest honor bestowed on an architectural practice by the institute.
BCJ was founded in 1965 and has offices in Wilkes-Barre, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Seattle, and San Francisco. The firm is known for exceptional design rigor as well as their commitment to the particularity of place and user. This extraordinary aesthetic is based on a quiet rigor that is both intellectual and intuitive.
The firm's principals and nearly 200 staff practice architecture and offer a broad range of related services. Their breadth and depth of skills and experience enable the practice to address a wide range of challenges—difficult sites, demanding budgets and time constraints, unusual technological requirements, and the integration of new construction with existing buildings and contexts. The firm responds to the particular circumstances of each situation, alive to the subtleties of place—man-made or natural, to the varied natures of client and user, to the character of institutions, and to the means of construction.
BCJ is also noted for exceptional and humane design, ranging from modest houses and recreational facilities to larger academic, research, civic, and corporate buildings. Their problem-solving approach emphasizes thorough research and analysis of each project's unique human, technical, and economic circumstances. They believe the best design comes from an alert and balanced response to the particular circumstances inherent in each situation.
In an essay about their firm's work, Gold Medal–winning architect Joseph Esherick comments, "What is remarkable is the degree to which BCJ achieve the highest possible technical standards of construction, of energy management, of sophisticated program requirements, and still preserve such freshness and openness."
It's particularly interesting to note that BCJ has always been a Macintosh shop (a noted irony considering its design history). They consisted of longtime MicroStation users, first on the Macintosh, but they later transitioned their workstations to the Windows platform for CAD starting with version 7 of MicroStation.
Apple's switch to the Intel platform provided the opportunity to return to the Macintosh, with options of running Windows virtualized (with Parallels or VMware) or by booting directly into Windows via Apple's Boot Camp technology. For low-end consumer computers, Apple can cost a premium. But for high-end workstations and laptops BCJ believes the current advantage of overall price, flexibility, build quality, and subsequent ease of maintenance make Apple products an easy choice.
When looking to make the move from CAD to BIM, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson investigated many of the BIM products available. Revit simply proved the most developed and complete solution available. The depth of resources available in the Revit community, and the number of colleagues, consultants, and collaborators using Revit made the decision to move to Revit even easier.
Initially, BCJ used both Parallels and VMware for their virtual computing environments. Both VMWare and Parallels provide simple, easy-to-maintain virtual solutions. But since that time they've begun to transition solely to Parallles.
For workstations, BCJ uses Mac Pro towers running at 2.6GHz and 2xQuad Core Xeons with10GB of RAM and VMware for virtualization. But for laptops, they selected the MacBook Pro running at 2.5GHz and containing Core Two Duo processors with 8GB RAM and Parallels for virtualization.
Overall, the employees have a brief accommodation period while learning how the two systems (host and guest computers) interact and how to best use the systems together. The company will periodically host an employee seminars and refresher sessions on getting the most from virtual machines.
In their experience, the isolation of running Windows and Revit from other primary tasks on the host computer running the Mac OS X environment has proven its worth when Windows crashes or has problems booting. They keep exact copies of VMs on hand for just such a case. If a virtual machine becomes suspect or corrupted, the end users simply shut down their VM and rename both images (the original for the backup, and vice versa), thereby swapping the backup for the original. Then they restart the VM and are up and running.
This flexibility has proved invaluable during tight deadlines, especially when someone is working late or on weekends when support from other associates or IT staff might be limited.
Another protective layer that BCJ utilized is adding a secondary hard drive to users' machines for hosting their virtual images. The additional backup copies are kept on the system drive in anticipation of hard drive failure. If the system drive fails, the user can simply shut down, take their virtual images on the second Apple drive sled, and move it to another Mac Pro and slide it in place. Then they can open their image by double-clicking on it or choosing it through Parallels or VMware. In such cases, the total downtime is about 15 minutes.
As for best practices, Peter highly recommends regularly discussing and sharing user experiences with other user users. It's important to gain as much as possible from their perspective. User experience often suggests potential tweaks to configuration, workflows, and preferences. Overall, sharing this knowledge is the best way to get a smooth, consistent environment for everyone involved.
Obviously there are a number of options an administrator can set right at the start. Creating a master image to roll out for the users significantly reduces setup time. It also provides a great platform for testing updates, upgraded or new software, and settings before impacting everyone's work.
Some particularly important issues from an administrative standpoint are that both Parallels and VMware Tools need to be reinstalled on all updates and occasionally at random maintenance intervals (possibly due to Windows updates). Additionally, Parallels and VMware Tools (like many other Windows-based applications) require Windows administrator-level permissions to install properly. Usually this can be accomplished by a "first-run" setup logged in as administrator, and then switching to the user's account.
It's important to note that Parallels and VMware updates require an administrative password on the Macintosh side of things. The process that Peter typically uses is the following:
Schedule an hour with the user to shut down Parallels or VMware.
Make a backup copy and then install the new version and upgrade the image.
Reinstall Parallels Tools. It's a good idea to test the VM for a bit, changing and tweaking any new settings as necessary.
Shut down and make another (new) backup copy. Then restart and get back to work (don't forget to delete the old VM).
Keep in mind that updating takes a significant amount of work. There are updates for two operating systems involved (OS X and Windows), not to mention all the related applications on both the host and guest computers. Peter manages this by testing all the updates himself and then after a couple of weeks (and a fair number of waiting upgrades have amassed), he schedules time with users to upgrade and update. And it's best to do the updates early in the morning or late in the evening.
Using Apple Remote Desktop, Peter can "push" new images to clients even while they continue to work, reducing transition time later, when the 40GB OS images are ready on the local machine for his administrative access. Mac OS system upgrades are sped up with the use of an in-house Apple Software Update Server that downloads the updates once and then distributes the updates to the client machines over the local network. This provides much faster installs for the workstations, while reducing overall Internet bandwidth impact.
BCJ began using investigating virtualization back in 2007. At that time they began implementing both VM Ware and Parallels. VMware was found more suitable for workstations and Parallels was better for laptops.
But over the past three years, Parallels has won out over VMware for a couple of reasons. Overall, they've been more pleased with the performance from Parallels (verified by higher Windows Experience Scores), including higher video RAM throughput and more core support in multicore machines. The following graphics show the specific settings in Parallels for both laptops and workstations. Keep in mind that current Apple laptops are limited to two cores, whereas BCJ uses workstations with four cores (a few of them have eight).
The hardware settings in Parallels reside on three tabs in the configuration panel. These settings control the general options, the options for applications, and the options for hardware. The General options are shown here. The important thing about this setting is that out of 8GB of RAM, the user is allocating 4GB of RAM to the virtual machine.
The Options tab contains a setting that allows you to control the startup and shutdown of the virtual machine. They have opted not to automatically start up the VM when the user logs into the host computer.
Optimization is important when using virtualization for 3D-intensive applications like Revit. Notice that BCJ is optimizing performance toward the virtual machine (rather than the host machine), as shown here, and they're leaning toward better performance (rather than extending battery life). Note that auto-compression has been disabled.
Services allow you to share the time and date settings of the host computer. This option has been selected, as shown here.
If you want to isolate your virtual environment from your host computer, this can be done through the Security settings. But by doing so, you won't be able to launch project files from the host machine. This option has not been selected, as shown here.
Creating a shared folder allows you to designate a specific location to share files between the host and virtual computers. But this option is not needed in an already networked environment.
Shared Profiles has not been selected either, as shown here. This is more useful if you're working the majority of time from the guest OS rather than the host OS. This is not typically the case, because most users of virtualization utilize the guest OS for access to a few, very important applications.
By sharing applications, you're able to launch files that reside on the host OS by the guest OS, as shown here. This is not being utilized.
Internet applications create consistent experiences between the guest and host OS. The default settings are being used, as shown here.
SmartMount allows other hardware, drives, and folders to map to the guest OS from the host OS. These options are not selected, as shown here.
SmartGuard allows you to automatically create snapshots of your entire virtual machine, so in the event of corruption you can in effect roll back your VM to a previous state. BCJ did not enable SmartGuard, as shown here, because they have other backup methods.
The ability to create an undo disk means that all the operations from the moment of starting the virtual session are not permanently stored. This is great for testing purposes but not needed in this case, as shown here.
BCJ has opted to show the Windows system tray in the Mac menu bar rather than show applications in the Dock, as shown here.
Full-screen mode is entered by moving your cursor to a predefined screen corner. This is a convenient way to share the same window. But keep in mind that users have another option in Mac spaces that allow you to create panels out of your desktop.
Note that BCJ has deselected the option that forces one window to stay on top of another window, as shown here. This allows you to see through the guest machine to the host machine.
Neither gestures nor remotes have been selected, as shown here. This means that the track pad will respond more conventionally in the guest OS.
Now we can begin to discuss some of the important hardware virtualization settings. The default boot order is shown here.
Using Revit in virtualization will require as many video resources as you can manage. In fact, most operations in virtualization are nearly concurrent in speed, as if running on a host OS. But there is a bottleneck with regard to video card simulation. As mentioned earlier, HP has created some interesting alternatives by dedicating video hardware to virtual machines. But these alternatives are not available in laptops or with Apple hardware.
BCJ has deselected the default option to share the CD/DVD player with the guest OS, as shown here. Again, these virtual machines are just for running Revit and little else. So, they're very lean from a resource and hardware standpoint.
Two hard disks are shown. You may only have one on your system. BCJ recommends having a separate drive that is used only for storing the virtual machine. Hard Disk 1, as shown here, is used for the host OS applications and files.
Hard Disk 2 is used to store the virtual machine image and nothing else, as shown here. According to Peter, performance increases when the host and guest OS don't need to share the same disk drive.
Selecting Connected, as shown here, allows the host machine to share the Internet connection of the host machine. If your intention is to keep the guest VM from accessing the Internet, then you'd want to deselect this option.
The hardware printer port is being shared, as shown here.
Again, the virtual machine is meant to be as light as possible from a resources standpoint. Not even sound is being shared between the host and guest, as shown here.
No USB devices are being shared, as shown here. When a USB device is plugged into the host computer, it will only show up on the desktop of the host machine.
- Understand the benefits of virtualization.
There are advantages of virtualization for both IT support as well as end users.
- Master It
What are the advantages of virtualization?
- Take advantage of virtualization.
Having to maintain multiple operating systems is hardly uncommon. But rather than maintain obsolete hardware and applications, why not utilize virtualization and maintain best-of-breed solutions?
- Master It
What's the easiest way to try out virtualization?