Virtual machines on the Macintosh

I started this page 5 years ago and never wrote anything here!

I used VirtualBox for most of that time, but today I think there is really only one serious contender.

Parallels.

The reason is their video driver. It works. The driver in VirtualBox and in VMWare Fusion is not good enough to work with ArcGIS Desktop. If you don't need high performance video, use VirtualBox. If you do, use Parallels.

Case closed. On to the next subject.

Other things I like about Parallels

1. Parallels is so well integrated into the Mac OS. I can put the icon for a Windows app into the doc, and it opens! Wow. Behind the scenes it's running a Windows 7 virtual machine, but to me it just looks like the app is running from the desktop.

2. Sharing. Once the tools are installed in the guest OS, moving between windows, cut and paste, sharing files is all transparent.

Networking with Parallels

AKA what I don't like (so far)

I get confused about how to set up Linux virtual machines in Parallels, so I decided to document what I need to do right here.

Today I am setting up a PostgreSQL / PostGIS server in Ubuntu Server to do development on my Mac.

I successfully built the Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine, but now it cannot connect to the Internet. In the Parallels virtual machine settings:

Hardware settings:
Network 1:
Connected (checked)
NIC Type: Virtio adapter (doesn't really matter)
Type: Bridged Network: Default Adapter

The rest of the set up takes place inside Linux. The machine needs to be set to get its network settings from DHCP. In "bridged mode" the virtual machine will be on the same network as your Mac. Using the Default Adapter setting means it can be on either the WiFi or ethernet adapter.

The big problem comes in cloning machines, the new machine gets a new MAC number and puts it at eth1 instead of eth0. Edit the udev file to fix it. Remove the old eth0 setting and change the new eth1 setting to eth0. Edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent