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- Your Mac's Specs
- macbook pro unibody 15", 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3
I am a 5-year Mac user, a Java developer who has used Macs for dev tasks for all that time, and Linux before that. I still use Linux on the desktop at work. My company is thinking of switching to Macbook Pros - the i5 version - for consultant's laptops. They are very price competitive with the Dell version.
"Productivity" applications on the base OS are not really an issue because we are moving to the Google platform in the coming months. All the basic developer tools we use (Subversion, Maven, Ant, Eclipse, etc) are available on the Mac already and of course, the /bin/sh prompt makes it much better for development than anything you get on a Windows install. ;-)
The kicker is that we need to run Virtualised environments on the machines as well as the base OS. What matters for us is being able to have pre-built virtualised server environments for development on client site. These usually need to be Centos or Redhat based Linuxes with things like Oracle SOA Suite installed in them.
We need to move to this sort of virtualised environment anyway for these apps. We use XEN on our own servers, but these images are different to the sort of thing we'd expect to run on a laptop. Therefore other virtualisation products are in play. What I'm interested in hearing about are thoughts about which virtualisation environment we should pick.
As we are not going ALL Mac straight away we need to be able to the virtualisation images to be run on any OS, e.g. Mac, Windows, and Linux (Ubuntu is the usual Linux desktop here). I am talking about using the Mac as a HOST system and virtualising Linux images which must also be able to run on Linux and Windows hosts. We are not trying to virtualise the OSX, I mean to discuss virtualisation on a Mac host.
My understanding is that this rules out Parallels because we can't get a version for Windows or Linux hosts.
I have used VMWare Fusion for at least a couple of years on my own Mac and its fine to use but I've since discovered that it cannot export its images to use under VMWare Player on a Linux box (curse you VMWare). But can it import a standard image created on VMWare Player? If that's so, it still might fly for us.
Free is better of course, so VirtualBox is also under consideration. I've only used it a little, and not a Mac. Does anyone have any solid experience with it on a Mac and wish to share anything? Is it reliable on a Mac?
Thankyou for your thoughts and observations.
"Productivity" applications on the base OS are not really an issue because we are moving to the Google platform in the coming months. All the basic developer tools we use (Subversion, Maven, Ant, Eclipse, etc) are available on the Mac already and of course, the /bin/sh prompt makes it much better for development than anything you get on a Windows install. ;-)
The kicker is that we need to run Virtualised environments on the machines as well as the base OS. What matters for us is being able to have pre-built virtualised server environments for development on client site. These usually need to be Centos or Redhat based Linuxes with things like Oracle SOA Suite installed in them.
We need to move to this sort of virtualised environment anyway for these apps. We use XEN on our own servers, but these images are different to the sort of thing we'd expect to run on a laptop. Therefore other virtualisation products are in play. What I'm interested in hearing about are thoughts about which virtualisation environment we should pick.
As we are not going ALL Mac straight away we need to be able to the virtualisation images to be run on any OS, e.g. Mac, Windows, and Linux (Ubuntu is the usual Linux desktop here). I am talking about using the Mac as a HOST system and virtualising Linux images which must also be able to run on Linux and Windows hosts. We are not trying to virtualise the OSX, I mean to discuss virtualisation on a Mac host.
My understanding is that this rules out Parallels because we can't get a version for Windows or Linux hosts.
I have used VMWare Fusion for at least a couple of years on my own Mac and its fine to use but I've since discovered that it cannot export its images to use under VMWare Player on a Linux box (curse you VMWare). But can it import a standard image created on VMWare Player? If that's so, it still might fly for us.
Free is better of course, so VirtualBox is also under consideration. I've only used it a little, and not a Mac. Does anyone have any solid experience with it on a Mac and wish to share anything? Is it reliable on a Mac?
Thankyou for your thoughts and observations.