Virtualization & solidworks

Just read my pc mag and the latest splash about virtualization of a pC
on a flash memeory stick.


Just wondering - has anyone tried this and put SW onto the Virtual PC
on the flash stick, so it is quick and easy to run SW on the machine
the stick is plug into.


Just a thought and was curious. Might make the 'home' license easier
to handle as I often get home and the family is using the machine I
want and while there is a spare PC sitting there unused and I can't
use it as the SW is locked to the popular machine.


Jonathan

 

SolidWorks runs under VMware, and that's excellent for tech support, I
can tell you (so dear customer you have SW2006 SP3 under Windows 2000,
2 mins please ... ok, here we are ...)

Now the graphics performance is very bad, because virtual machines can
not (yet) use 3D acceleration of your real GPU. They work in "OpenGl
software emulation" mode only. Slow.

The license will theoretically be linked to your virtual machine,
which you can take where you want, and eventually copy. Now a virtual
machine is more than just an application : it's an image of a harddisk
with a full Windows install, so it takes abut 6Gb with SolidWorks
installed. You'd need a bit more storage than the average USB key...

 

tried this on a vista computer with a 2GB stick (2GB ram on
computer). it did increase my memory to allow more processing and
less swap disk. but the USB2 port is not as fast as the bus speed on
a mother board so i did see a slow down similar to using swap disk
files. i only had for a short time and i did not get it to work with
SWx 2007. did not have 2008 yet when i tested. i tested on large
illistrator files. again it works but the speed of USB2 is the
limitation. i would suggest memory upgrade before i would do this.
although it is a interesting idea, i just worry about the volitity of
using flash memory in this manor. it works great for storing files,
but there is a lot of transferring going on in RAM all of the time and
transferring all of this through a USB port to flash may not give
expected results (possibly setting up for a software crash). if i get
to test this again, and with SWx 2008, i will submit my results. i am
still leaning away from Vista for production use at my location. iQ

 

USB keys tend to be somewhat slow, or at least some do from the notes
I've read.

But the new "Flash Drives" that are starting to show in higher end
laptops are reportedly very fast, though I don't know how they do it.

I think I'ld rather run Windows off of an external hard drive or flash
drive in native Windows of your favorite flavor, as you would get
native performance, and be entirely usable.

On the Windows side, having an OS installed on a Hard Drive doesn't
necessarily mean you can plug into any PC box & run it though because
of things like drivers and other hardware issues specific to each PC
box.

On the Mac side with Leopard 10.5 today, you can have an external Hard
drive with OS 10.5 and with say Windows XP on a Boot Camp partition
and take that hard drive to any Intel Mac from the Mini, to MacBook,
to MacBook Pro to MacPro, and that one hard drive will run Windows
Native on all the Macs. Slick.

I have not yet tried VMWare on my Mac, because I know that the speed
is reduced in the emulated video driver as Philip noted above, and
that would be why I too would avoid it.

Bo

 

Keep in mind that flash memory has a limited number of state changes. Using
it as portable storage would probably never exceed that point, but to
constantly change as active working memory probably would eventually, maybe
even sooner than later - I don't know.

WT

 

Thanks you all for your advice - it was very interesting to read and
informative - looks like the real solution is I will have to get
firmer with my kids - but one day they will be bigger than me
- but that is a long way off .

Jonathan