Quote:
Originally Posted by sanddrag
techhelpbb, to someone like me who is not super experienced in VMs, I have to be honest, this sounds like a complete nightmare.
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It is no more difficult than installing the OS in the virtual machine.
Then installing the software in that OS.
VMWare especially works *very* well.
I own a license for VMWare Workstation: I create a virtual machine with a certain amount of storage, CPU and RAM. I tell it to mount the OS CD-ROM in my drive. It boots like your computer installing the OS and off you go.
There are no more unusual issues setting that up than setting up any other physical computer.
The only way you escape that aspect is to get the computer with the OS already installed.
Keep in mind...I have worked in virtual environments with literally thousands of virtual machines (my current employer has 25,000+ systems many of them virtual nearly 1,000 are basically my responsibility) and I have nothing to do with the other students who have posted that have actually made variations of this work (regardless of BobCAD).
Honestly most of the students that have posted are using Oracle VirtualBox. That's free and it not only has all the usual installation issues it has some issues on top of those. They seemingly have managed to work it out.
I did not use VirtualBox for BobCAD because: I wanted good graphics and communications support.
If VMWare couldn't make this work it probably wasn't going to get better with other choices and I'd be forced to put the problem down by putting the software back on whatever the PC was running for a native OS.
Now...you want hard? Try getting all the drivers to natively run Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron 660s. Let me know when you give up on the Dell internal WiFi driver. Basically that's the choice instead of what I did. Which Microsoft 'complete nightmare' would you prefer?
Course for the next option I can spend thousands to upgrade: whenever Microsoft or some other company decides to drop support for something. Maybe Microsoft's monetary bottom line is a little light this month so it'll be Windows 9. What's that value to insulate yourself from this treadmill? Take a good look at your IT budget and what actually drives your costs.
Let's play my favorite IT business game: what new and highly valuable function does this software treadmill actually get me for the cost of my investment this week? It *still* runs Word for now
. Maybe it opens ISO files without a free 3rd party plug-in? Gets me a graph of my file transfer rates without a 3rd party plug-in? Hey I can make it work like the last OS GUI I was forced to learn by installing: a 3rd party plug-in.
Keep in mind: IBM has been virtualizing systems long before there was a personal computer revolution (late 1960s and early 1970s).
There's a lot to learn but the real nightmare is piling up huge piles of waste to avoid learning it.
The fundamentals of this technology are older than I am.
Also there's the simple matter that a virtualization engineer with experience can likely demand a six figure salary.
http://www.simplyhired.com/salaries-...neer-jobs.html
Versus:
http://www.simplyhired.com/salaries-...mmer-jobs.html
So since we are willing as mentors to introduce students to CNC perhaps we should be willing to introduce them to virtualization.
Oh and I can do a virtualization job from basically anywhere with Internet with the client's permission.
It is a bit harder to program CNC without a machine which is a pretty serious capital expense.