March 31, 2007 at 11:47 pm
I will be buying a new desktop by the end of April, my poor li'l Thinkpad T23 is hanging on via bailing wire and bubblegum. I'm giving very serious consideration to getting a DuoCore Mac laptop and running (probably) Win2K Pro/SQL 2000 through Parallels. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any forum posts regarding this.
Has ANYONE done this? I've talked to geeks at the Apple stores, I've talked to Apple "experts/consultants", etc., and I haven't been able to find anyone who has done this. Unfortunately when I was at the Apple store last week, I didn't have my SQL2K5 DVD with me to try it.
This is strictly for personal use/non-production. I'm starting a new job and I'll have a Dell desktop talking to multiple Dell SQL Servers. But for my personal use, I'm going Mac, but I still want/need SQL Server on it to experiment with, I'll also probably copy the occasional DB to fiddle with something after hours on.
April 1, 2007 at 9:29 am
I have a Mac Dual Core for the kids, but haven't gotten around to putting Boot Camp or Parallels on it. NEed to try it and see. I just saw Vista is running in Boot Camp and I haven't really heard any issues about most software running on a Mac. I know the SQL 2000 tools worked in the VM as I've had friends to it, but never saw if they had the engine running.
I like my Desktop Dell with 2GB, but I have to saw that the Mac is nice for anything multimedia related. I've got a couple projects to finish over the next few days, but I'll see if I Can get Boot Camp running on mine.
Steve
April 1, 2007 at 12:26 pm
I went to the Parallels web site to see if they had any public forums where I could post this question, unfortunately they didn't have any. So I sent them an email asking the same question.
Maybe I can find someone at the university running Parallels who will be kind enough to let me run an experiment, that, or maybe I'll run up to Albuquerque some weekend and try it at the Apple store up there.
Boot Camp doesn't really do it for me because effectively you're multi-booting. With Parallels, you've got a virtual engine going, so you can instantly switch between OS-X and Win*.
BTW, you can download a trial copy of Parallels at http://www.parallels.com....
June 5, 2007 at 10:04 am
IT'S ALIVE!
I bought a Macbook a month and a half ago, it's a base model: 1 gig ram, 80 gig HD, Core2 Duo CPU at 2 GHz with OS-X 10.4. Saturday I re-discovered my XP Pro install disc, so I re-installed and patched Parallels, followed by installing and patching XP Pro. Monday I installed SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition ($50 gets you the full Enterprise version including Itanium and X64 editions), downloaded SP2A and started it installing. Today I completed the service pack install, and I now have SQL 2005 running on my Macintosh laptop!
I installed just the base database system and client tools, I knew I didn't have space for installing analysis server and all of the other spiffy new toys. (well, new to me: I've never gotten my hands on 2K5.) Unfortunately my copy of XP Pro is not the 64-bit edition, so I had to install the X86 version. And I don't know if this is a limitation of Parallels or XP Pro, but Task Manager is only reporting one CPU. I would have thought that Core2 Duo would have seen two CPUs.
The main problem that I ran in to was disk space. I have my complete music library on this laptop eating some 30gig, and thus didn't have a lot of free disk space when I started this project. You really ought to have probably 10-15 gig available to install all this stuff uninterrupted. This was especially a PITB while installing the service pack because of the SP backing up the components as it is doing the patching, I'd frequently get a popup saying "Parallels needs 512 MB of disk space and you only have 510 MB free. Clean it up and click OK." (not an actual quote). I went through this several times before the SP install completed. I still need to install the BOL SP, but that isn't core to the system.
I ran in to one other issue after the service pack completed and the computer (actually the virtual session) rebooted, Windows seemed to hang just before the logon screen. I shut down the virtual engine and restarted it, and Windows came up just fine. I fired up SSMS, and the version displayed corresponded to SP2A. I haven't really exercised the system, just browsed some of the database objects in the sample DB, I'll play some more with it later.
Anyway, I'm quite happy! In a month or so I'll be more happy: I'm selling my condo and will be getting a MacBook Pro with 2gig ram and a 200gig HD, at that point I'll be installing the full 2K5 system. My wife will get my current laptop and her older Mac laptop will be retired.
One thing that I would not recommend on my laptop's configuration is switching between the Parallels virtual system and the Mac laptop. Parallels running XP Pro is eating a fair amount of OS-X resources and isn't sharing terribly well. You can access Mac apps that are running, but don't expect fast response. I'm hoping that the new laptop with more ram will take care of this.
(oh, I'm the original poster -- I temporarily needed a second logon)
-----
[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
June 6, 2007 at 7:23 am
Wayne,
Thanks for the update. I was wondering if you moved forward. I haven't had time to experiment, but good to know this works well.
June 6, 2007 at 9:33 am
It wasn't difficult, Steve, but it certainly took time. Having 2gig ram in the machine would certainly help, as would having a decent amount of free disk space: that way you'd have higher performance and no interruptions and it should become a fire and forget installation.
It's definitely pretty cool.
One thing that I need to learn is how the Ctrl/Alt and function keys map under Parallels, I've done everything thus far without reading the manual and it looks like now I'm at the point where I need to RTFM to pick up on minutia. I'm mainly using a USB wireless mouse for keyboard control because I can't figure out how to do a right-click using the Mac's touchpad, though I think I just realized what I'm doing wrong and shall test it forthwith.
Under the current Parallels, v2~, you get a Parallels Shared folder icon on the Win desktop. Any file in this directory is shared between the Mac and Win systems. On the Parallels side, you can link any OS-X directory to be accessible to the virtual OS. You can also link in the USB port, CD, I think you can also do the laptop's built-in web cam. Wireless networking picked up on my Mac's configuration, so I didn't have to reenter WPA info or even the SSID when it came to accessing my home network. I can't connect my laptop to work's WiFi, so I downloaded the two SPs for 2k5 on my desktop and copied them over with a thumb drive.
As I understand it, under the next version of Parallels, the entire Mac HD is available to the virtual OS.
Oh, and performance has improved. I think now that the installation is done, the HD activity level has calmed down and it switches between the virtual PC and the Mac desktop much more smoothly.
I'm definitely having fun, and it's been cool showing off it running to my co-workers (developers and some admins). I took some flack from my boss who likes to rib me on buying a Mac, but he admitted that it was very cool and wants a more detailed discussion on how I did it.
-----
[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply