Switching Over to a Mac (Noob needing advice)

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First time poster and a first time Mac owner, so please have patience with me. I'm an engineering grad student so I do a lot of CAD work. I also do web and graphic design part-time. I have a rMBP 15 2.3ghz 16gb 256gb

I have a fresh copy of windows 7 ultimate with one activation and a student copy of vmware fusion 5. I want to install windows 7 as a bootcamp but I want to use the fusion 5 feature that allows you to power the bootcamp partition in a virtual machine. But I'm seeing a lot of people saying I'm going to need two serial numbers for windows due to the actual hardware being one computer and the virtual machine looking like another. Although, I am seeing on VMware's support that their vmware tools keeps this activation problem from happening.

Link to VMware Fusion 5 doc that says you can boot without 2 licenses.

-So my First question is: Will VMware's VMtools keep me from having to have two licenses to boot my bootcamp partition from inside of Mountain Lion?

The only reason why I want to bootcamp is so that when I run CAD I can take advantage of all my hardware. I just don't have enough experience with virtual machines to know if programs like Solidworks and AutoCAD Architecture will run in the VM.

-Second question- Does anyone think these mentioned CAD programs will work fine if I simply just install into VM and skip the bootcamp all together?

Thanks for the help
 

chscag

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-So my First question is: Will VMware's VMtools keep me from having to have two licenses to boot my bootcamp partition from inside of Mountain Lion?

Maybe. We've received reports both ways. Some users say they have had no problem with activation when running Windows 7 from both a VM and a separate BC partition, while others reported having to activate again. Even if you do need to activate again, a simple call to MS will take care of it without having to purchase another license.

-Second question- Does anyone think these mentioned CAD programs will work fine if I simply just install into VM and skip the bootcamp all together?

Again maybe. Some users have stated they needed to run CAD from a separate BC partition in order to get maximum utilization from the hardware.
Personally, I would use Boot Camp and not bother installing Fusion at all. The only benefit you get from virtualizing the BC partition is not having to reboot.
 

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