Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

Cocoa developer Craig Hockenberry wants you to file a bug report on the OS X license restrictions that prevent desktop virtualization:

How can you develop new products for Leopard when you need to have Tiger installed for supporting your legacy applications? How easy is it to test a new feature on Mac OS X 10.4.11 when you’re running 10.5? How quickly can you reproduce a bug on 10.4.10 if you’re running 10.4.11? Can you run Xcode versions 3.0 and 3.1 at the same time from /Developer?

We all know the way to get Apple’s attention regarding our issues is to submit bugs. So now is the time to vote for virtualization. If you agree with the following, please copy and paste this bug report and submit it so that it becomes a duplicate of Bug ID# 5812840.

I agree with everything Craig is saying, and I can’t wait to see OS X virtualization available. As a developer, the benefits to testing software without switching computers or rebooting to a different operating system are enormous. The only downside is that virtualization will never allow me to emulate PPC processors along with Intel. Until I decide to cut support for PPC entirely (it will probably be a few years before I even consider this), I’m going to have to keep my old PowerBook on a side table for additional testing.

Since I’ve been using VMware Fusion a lot recently, I’ve started looking around for performance tips (both to get the best results from inside Fusion, and avoid slowing my MacBook Pro to a crawl when it’s running in the background). Besides buying more RAM or a faster Mac, here are a few things you can do when setting up a new VM that may not be immediately obvious:

• Install the 64bit version of your guest operating system. See this post by a VMware software engineer for the technical reasons why. The big drawback to running 64bit Windows is lack of driver support, and since drivers are provided by VMware, it’s not a huge concern in the VM world as it is with physical hardware.
• Use SCSI rather than IDE hard disks; the VMware SCSI driver is faster. Since the Windows XP installer doesn’t won’t recognize SCSI disks without an additional driver, you might want to use Fusion’s “easy install” option.
• Don’t use more than one CPU per guest. Emulating two CPUs will lead to horrible performance in my experience.
• Use fast, external hard disks if possible. The goal is to reduce contention between the host operating system or other VMs, especially if you’re on a notebook with a slower 5400rpm hard drive.

Thanks to Tony Arnold and various online forums for this information.