How-to: Running VM's on a Mac

[danielberm]

Hi folks,

Here's a quick How-to on how to get your environment setup on a Mac. I've probably spent about 40 hours trying to get the best situation for doing this. This article first lists out the issues I ran into, then talks about the solution I found that worked best (but not completely 100%).

Issues:
-My home network is setup over a 2wire router (ATT). With the 2wire router I ran into problems connecting to the internet from a subdomain because it only allows you to add one routing address for all subdomains on the network. This prevented me from connecting to the internet from Mordor. I also ran into problems of getting IP addresses in a bridged situation over a wireless connection.

-VMWare Fusion - VMWare Fusion is the Mac VMWare product. It functions well, but doesn't allow you the flexibility to set host sub-networks on the VM's like VMWare Workstation does on Windows. In Workstation you can set a VM to a subdomain such as VMNet3. I was unable to get this to work in Fusion

-File sizes over 2 Gig will not be allowed for a VM on a Windows box with Fat32. I ran into this problem with the William VM.

-Running VMWare Workstation in either VMWare Fusion or Parallels is not allowed. In VMWare Fusion it says that you can't run Workstation on a virtual machine. In Parallels you flat-out crash the VM when trying to run Workstation.

The result I found:
-Register for MSDN for Cabrillo. Download the XP version and burn to disk. Download a copy of VMWare workstation (I have version 6.0.3 ).

-On your Mac, first use the "Disk Utility" program to make sure that your drive is in good shape. Repair all issues found. If you fail to do this you may run into situations where you cannot create the Windows partition because the filesystem isn't correct (an issue I ran into).

-Then use the Bootcamp Assistant to create your Windows partition. For the Cis192 course your will need about 40 gigs in order to load all the VM's. This process takes awhile and will ask you for the Windows installation disk at the end of the process. Install the disk and the system will reboot.

-Start up the Windows installation process and install Windows on the Bootcamp partition you created in the Bootcamp Assistant. Format the Bootcamp partition to be NTFS (to get around the 2 gig file limitation issue). Note, using NTFS will make it so that you cannot view your windows partition in OSX, but it looks like the next version of OSX has ability to read NTFS.

Note- Apple has a great how-to on installing Windows in Bootcamp. I HIGHLY suggest you print out a copy. There are a couple of loose ends I will not go over in this article.

-Go through the Windows installation.

Note-When you wish to boot into Windows on computer startup you hold down the "option" key on the Mac when booting up.

-Install VMWare Workstation. Copy the VMs for Cis192 to your local computer. In my case I grabbed all the VM's at once with an external USB2 drive.

-In Workstation open the VM and press the start link.

Note- You will need to use Nosmo in order to get a DHCP and other things. Looks to the simms-teach.com site for information on how to setup Nosmo from this point.

[Rich Simms]

Hi Daniel,

This looks great! If you get a chance you ought to package it up as a Student Howto to publish on [url]http://simms-teach.com/resources.php[/url] and earn some additional extra credit points at the same time.

- Rich

[fred_deakin]

I ended up setting-up a Boot Camp partition so that I could do the labs at home (no subnets on VMWare Fusion was such a bummer). I've noticed that in Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) that you can view the Windows partition in OS X (and can even move files between file systems).

However, I did notice that Leopard will not read NTFS file systems on external devices.

[Kayla Smith]

Thanks a lot, Dan. I'm going to get my mac set up with a couple VMs after the semester.

[Kyle Rudnick]

For NTFS read/write capabilities from your OS X side, a great tool is NTFS-3G: http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

Likewise, use MacDrive (http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/) to mount your OS X partitions while booted into Windows. Note that the beta version of MacDrive 8 is required for use on Windows 7.