Is there any virtualization solution that supports metal api?
We have an app that uses Metal internally, and we'd like to test it across different macOS versions. Unfortunately it seems that VirtualBox, Parallels Desktop & VMWare Fusion doesn't enable Metal API in their guest macOS.
How can we test the app without having multiple physical machines or without using dual-boot?
UPDATED ANSWER 2019
Parallels Desktop v. 15 finally uses Metal. See their blogpost.
ORIGINAL ANSWER:
As far as I researched there's no chance of doing so with virtual machines.
The only feasible work-around we found is to:
find/purchase hi-speed USB drive (or even external SSD)
install various macOS versions on partitions of the USB drive
boot your Mac from the pendrive and select the OS you want to test
Not ideal, but does the job.
Related
Now i develop Xamarin application on my Hyper-V workstation. I'm using nested virtualization to host MacOS Mojave on Ubuntu host.
I write small project describe this https://github.com/vkorotenko/MacOSMojaveOnHyper-V
But i have some problem. To many virtualization and no HW accelerated video.
Possible or not run MacOS on Hyper-V with hardware video acceleration without nested virtualization?
I searched several forums and it seems that it is not supported by Apple. Thus, there is some instable projects to do so.
You may search for images on Google, but it is far easier to find stable versions for VMWare and VirtualBox. The reason is that HyperV is a closer to metal virtualization that is specific to Microsoft and harder to deploy for hackers than a classical virtual machine.
I understand that you may want to use HyperV since many other dev tools requires it. Docker and WSL are good examples.
Another option is to rely on Hackintosh to install your MacOS on bar metal, by making a partition of your disk. This will be the closest to native performances and behavior.
All of this is NOT supported by Apple EULA and thus I will not provide any link. But it is easy to find.
I use Mac OSX. I now want to try and develop an app on windows 8 for the Imagine Cup.
But i dont want to switch back to windows.
Is there any way to develop apps for windows 8 from mac?
Preferably free option....
The only available way is to use Virtual Machine because one cannot develop Windows 8 Modern UI app(Windows Store app) even with lower version of windows than windows 8. There are many virtual machines are available for free. Virtualbox maybe a good start.
www.techspot.com/guides/503-windows-8-virtual-machine ,A Tutorial to create vm of windows 8.
Assuming that windows phone is the platform you chose to develop app, again you need windows to create windows phone app.
Kick start your windows phone app development here .
I actually use VMWare on a Mac to do all of my Win32 development on Windows 7 and VS2010.
You will need:
a powerful mac (i7)
lots of RAM (I have 8G, I wish I had 16G)
a 7200rpm HDD or SSD.
With that, it's really great for me. I've been doing this for a few months now without a single kernel panic or blue screen at all.
Note: You cannot really develop for WP7 using this sort of configuration. The WP7 simulator uses VirtualBox, which either runs extremely slowly or not at all in other VMs, based on our experience. Will need a real Windows machine for that ^_^
It's a workable scenario. Good luck!
I would like to create my Kinect development environment and am contemplating using iMac as the box with Windows 7 installed as dual boot and/or parallels.
Has anyone tried this configuration earlier and does it work?
Running Bootcamp(dual boot) works with windows 7/8 Parallels does not.
I have a macpro 1,1 and a mac air both work with bootcamp(dual boot).
The only thing that could cause it not to work is the USB configuration. Kinect requires that it be connected to a USB host controller and not a hub. I believe all of the iMac's USB ports are host ports so I don't believe this to be an issue. If you use the Kinect Sensor Chooser control built into the WPFViewers sample app it will tell you if that particular problem arises (insufficient bandwidth).
Parallels will not work with the SDK at the time of this writing due to driver. Kinect is not an official USB device and the driver requires direct communication with the Kinect. I hoped that this would be resolved with the official Kinect for Windows hardware but alas it was not.
You might want to look at native OSX Kinect development using OpenKinect
http://openkinect.org/wiki/Getting_Started
If you don't want to have to write all the image processing code yourself, and are working in C#, you could start with the Accord library:
http://accord-net.origo.ethz.ch/
After having had a dev PC HD corrupt, I'm considering the idea of making my development environment be fully Virtual PC based.
The core items would be:
- XP Pro 32
- IIS
- VS2003
- VS2008
- SQL Server 2005
- Office 2003
Primary source would reside on a server in SVN with only a clocal copy on the VPC.
This would be for Windows based web and desktop development.
Assuming that the host machine has decent performance and provides for hardware virtualization, are there any known gotchas with such a setup, ie main pros and cons. Any performance issues or other issues that make this a good or bad idea?
I'd like to go this route so I can create a full backup VPC that can be put on a new PC if one fails and is repalced or copied to a laptop as needed for offsite work, etc. With the new Virtual PC features of Win7 this seems like it may be even better goign forward too.
Would like to get some feedback on this before we go down that road...
I wouldn't recommend Virtual PC because the performance is pretty disappointing compared to VMWare.
I've used a virtual development machine inside VMWare Workstation and VMWare Fusion on Mac for quite a while, and it works very well. It feels as if you're running on a dedicated machine.
My recommendations are:
Use a 64-bit OS as your host OS (Vista x64, Windows 7 64-bit, Mac OS X Leopord)
Have at least 6GB of RAM on your physical machine
Allocate 3GB of RAM to your VM for 32-bit, or more for a 64-bit guest OS
Pre-allocate the diskspace for your guest OS (no auto-grow)
Another advantage is that you can take your VM from a Windows-based VMWare Workstation to a Mac-based VMWare Fusion (and the other way around) without any problems.
I have been running multiple virtual development environments in MS Virtual PC and Virtualbox for 2 years now. I am doing mostly asp.net applications, some of the solutions are relatively large and use large databases which I also run inside the VM.
My observations based on this:
It is a good idea for exactly the reasons you mention and it works fine. Go for it!
768 megs of ram for the VM is enough, but more is better.
Have a Multi-core CPU.
Install the virtual machine additions for the guest OS. (This is basically like installing the proper drivers for your "virtual" hardware, and seems to be more important for performance than having hardware virtualisation support).
If possible, have the VM disk image on
a separate physical disk from the
host OS.
Use Virtualbox. It's free, and being developed rapidly. It might already be the best.
If you can satisfy the above, performance is no issue. Multiple Visual studio instances, IIS, SQL, Office, works just fine.
Running multiple copies of the same guest OS when it is a member of a domain/AD is tricky. If you need to do this you should read up on the sysprep.exe tool. Basically you can't just make a copy of the virtual disk, you need to take some special precautions.
Virtual PC is very convenient and it was what I used for starters, but I have to say that virtualbox seems to have overtaken it now. It was a bit rough in the beginning but the last few versions have really gotten there.
Virtualbox is fully free, and it has better features than VPC2007 - the main one that made me switch was the support for high resolutions. Virtualbox runs fullscreen on my 1920x1080 no problem.
It can also run virtual PC images, so switching was just a matter of installing virtualbox and adding my existing virtual PC disks to it.
An added benefit is that I can run the virtual images just as easily on my new mac as on the old pc.
The commercial options are not (anymore) worth what they cost, IMHO.
One thing you might have to consider is the lack of support for multiple monitors within the VM. I really like using multiple monitors, one for my source, the rest for all the rest. As far as I know, this is not possible in Virtual PC. Aside from that I can't think of anything that should hold you back, it's something I have been considering as well.
Regards,
Sebastiaan
VirtualBox from Sun is also a good choice. I am writing this from a Vista laptop with a virtualised Ubuntu dev environment.
One thing that Virtual Box is great for is having a seamless mode in which the guest OS application windows are presented as just windows on the host system, with a single common background (you get 2 status bars - one for Windows and one for Linux).
The Z-orders don't interpolate (ie all guest windows appear on the same Z plane in the host Window system, with their own Z-order within that plane) which can make it a bit odd, but you get used to it.
It is particularly useful if you need to build across many environments. VirtualBox is getting better and I now have an OpenSolaris environment and a FreeBSD one as well.
It is free as in beer which can be handy.
I actually run three development environments (and many test environments) under Ubuntu host in Windows guest virtual machines - it's very good for keeping things separated and for being able to restore test environments to a known point. It's also handy since the backup is a simple directory copy on the host and you don't have to worry about recovering settings or re-installing applications. etc.
I prefer VMWare over Virtual PC for both performance and usability (keep in mind that's my opinion). You don't need the VMWare Workstation product to create a VM - check out EasyVMX here for a way to create easy VMs.
The one thing you'll miss though is VMWare tools which only comes with the Workstation product, not the player. But VMWare has this for download here - I'm unsure of the legality of this even though it's an official download from VMWare, you may only be able to use it if you have the paid product.
I actually have a license for Workstation, it's just an earlier version and I prefer the latest Player.
What do you recommend for quickly creating images for testing a software product (that needs hardware access - full USB port access)? Does virtualization cover this? I need to be able to quickly re-image the system to test from scratch again, and need good options for Windows and Mac OS.
Virtualization may work for you as long as it is only USB access.
VirtualBox is available with USB support either for "private use or evaluation" or commercially and works on Win, Mac and Linux. USB support on Linux and Mac is somewhat sporadical though and does not work with all devices. VBox supports snapshots.
VMWare has one free product called VMWare Server for Win and Linux but I'm not sure how far USB support is included in their server products. For Mac there is VMWare Fusion but that's not available for free. Fusion should work with most USB devices. Workstation products for Windows are more expensive. I think there is a trial version for all of them. All do snapshots.
I don't know how far Parallels (Mac) supports USB devices or snapshots.
You don't need snapshot functionality if you can afford some short downtime between re-imaging. You can shut down the VM and then just copy the disk image (which is nothing else but one or multiple regular files) and start the VM again. Snapshots can be reverted to a lot faster (without rebooting).
If virtual machines will work for you, you can choose between Virtual PC, VMWare and VirtualBox.
Virtual PC supports Win host and Win/linux guests. Although there are some caveats with regards to the X resolution support.
VMWare supports Win, OS X and Linux host. It supports Win and Linux guests.
VirtualBox supports same hosts and guests as VMWare.
None of the three supports OS X as guest officially. The reason is that OS X is licensed only for Apple machines. However, there are some hacks that allow installing OS X under VMWare. It might be also possible to install it under VirtualBox or Virtual PC, although I have not seen specific instructions.
If virtualization is not good enough for you, you can use precreated installation images or a disk imaging program.
For precreated installation images for Windows, you can use the sysprep tool (search for sysprep or system preparation tool). I don't know if there are equivalent tools for OS X from Apple.
For disk imaging programs, I know quite a lot people swear by Symantec Ghost. I personally have not used it, so can't give you much info about it. There's also a list of disk imaging programs on Wikipedia, so you evaluate these as well.
Hope that helps.
If virtualization is right for you depends on how much access direct access you actually need.
But if virtualization works then vmware offers products for Windows and Mac that support a Snapshot feature.
Or there's also VirtualBox which works on Linux, Windows and Mac, also supports snapshots and is free.
I use VMWare Player for this sort of stuff. I've not tested it with the sort of access you discuss (since I mostly do apps rather than driver-level stuff) but the advantages are many, specifically being able to copy the VM when it's shut down for later restore to a specific point (sort of a poor man's snapshot) and being able to have lots of configurations without blowing the hardware budget.
It certainly provides USB virtualization and I would say it's the best bet for providing the full device access. I would suggest testing it since, if it provides the hardware support you need, it's a very good solution for the other reasons given. The only other (non-VM) suggestion I can think of which would match it would be hard disk image backups which can be restored at will.
I've used Virtual PC heavily for this kind of thing in Windows, without ever hitting any issues. It's free, which is always a bonus ;o)
Edit: Just re-read the question - not sure that it has USB support. Should tick all the other boxes though
CloneZilla is a great, free way to reimage machines.
Once I worked for some company where we needed to test our software for various combinations of versions of OS, SPs and some other libraries which our application was dependent on. For each separate identified combination we had a separate partition image created with the help of Norton Ghost (DOS version). All images were put to a server. Whenever a tester got the next version of the system core to test, they would just methodically restore from all applicable images, install the application, test it and report it.
This approach though a straightforward one would allow full access to the hardware and will provide you with 100% native installation.
Nowadays, I still use this approach for my private PC. I'm sure you can try the latest achievements like Hyper-V. We use it nowadays where I work. When we tried to install Team Foundation Server (the process is far from being easy) we also had to drop the process at some point and just restore a virtual machine from an image because we realized we made a few mistakes during installation. Conceptually the same approach that saves a great deal of time. I'm not really sure though how compatible a virtual PC is in the sense of hardware access.
You can try both approaches.
P.S. Today there are two Ghost products, Symantec Ghost (good old one) for corporate use and Norton Ghost for home use (bloatware in my opinion). If you decide to try this option, I would recommend the Symantec Ghost (part of Ghost Solution Suite).
If you can't just use a virtual machine and take snapshots of the fresh install then do a fresh install onto real hardware and use a disk imaging tool (Ghost comes to mind).
If cost is a factor then there's a few Linux live CDs that will do what you want. This comes to mind. Put a second disk in the machine and image from the second disk unless you have fast networks and network storage; it's way to slow to go to and from the network regularly. If you're using a Linux live CD then you can actually set the second disk to EXT3 so Windows won't detect it and assign a drive letter too.
If you have a dedicated workstation for testing then I would highly recommend Symantec Ghost. Simply get the workstation to the clean state, reboot to ghost and 'take a snapshot' of the HD or partition. You can then replace the HD or partition from the image say from CD or multicasted over a network connection from another PC.
I have used it for years now, even to the point of automating the build of 60 test workstations (at the same time).