Is autocad a good vm candidate?

[kfkehua]

I've seen some posts here and there about autocad. My question is, is autocad a good virtual candidate to begin with?

I don't have much experience with this app, but my understanding is that it uses GPU heavily. So is it a good idea to install autocad on a VM?

If so, are there anything to watch out for or any word of cautions?

Can anybody share? thx.

[admin]

VMware Fusion (virtualization platform for MacOS) has the best graphics performance when it comes to graphics intensive applications running inside of a virtual environment.

VMware Fusion is pretty cheap, around 80 dollars or something like that and it performs quite well on a nice Macbook Pro or iMac :-).

[kfkehua]

No, we are doing this on a corp environment. Full blown VMware and View 4.5 setup using thinclients. Client OS is Windows 7.

[weinstein5]

Having managed an architectural firm - I would say that for the majority of your acad users yes it is a fine candidate for virtualization but there will be a group of high end acad users, those doing high end graphics, 3d modeling/rendering, might not be good candidates for and I would test before you virtualizae theme -

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[admin]

I'm in agreement with weinstein5

Providing AutoCad in a VMware View environment would be ok for some of your users, mainly those who can get by with 2d modeling. But anyone looking for major 3d modeling and decent performance, a VMware View VM, which is essentially an ESX VM will simply not be good enough.  The graphics capabilities for a ESX based VM are no way near as good as that of a VMware Fusion VM.

For those users within your area who would be looking for decent 3d modeling and redering power, performance, speeds, etc... VMware Fusion/MacOS would be the ideal solution.

Great graphics and MacOS simply just go together :-).

[trb48]

AutoCAD works great as a virtual desktop in View 4.5. We have AutoCAD running in a computer lab at our college. We are running Windows XP virtual desktops. We also have Office 2007, Google Sketchup, Firefox, Chrome, Flash, Reader, etc. installed on the desktop.

There are a few settings you need to have so it works well. We started off with 512 MB of RAM and we heard from students that after about an hour the machine started to slow down. On half of the machines I increased the RAM to 1024 MB. On the other machines I increased the video RAM to 32 MB. I haven't heard any complaints since. One of those two things should solve the problem.

In our tests students said that AutoCAD actually worked better on a virtual machine than it did on a physical machine. The students here don't do much 3D in AutoCAD, just regular drafting.

I hope this helps...

-trb48

[admin]

Again, I am agreement with trb48 🙂

2D modeling will/should be fine in terms of performance, because 2D modeling is actually not that intensive in terms of graphics.

However, you will start to see performance issues arise when attempting 3D modeling in an ESX VM.

I would strongly advise testing it out for yourself before commiting to deploying it as a wide scale solution within your environment.

I would also recommend trying out a test on a Vmware Fusion environment and compare the results for yourself. I think you will be nicely surprised by the Fusion performance 🙂

Have fun!

[vmars]

Hello everybody,

we could use some help, maybe you have a hint for us.

We've been installing ACAD 11 in a view environment and need only 2D-performance. Everything works fine, but we still have a problem with the cursor. When moving the cursor in the upper area, where the menu and symbols are, everythin is ok. When moving the cursor down to the drawing area, the cursor turns to a cross hairs and we have a very short, but unpleasent delay in the cursor movement (only in the drawing area!!)

We are still testing this over a strong WAN connection, but we are not sure, if this might work better in a LAN environment. Or maybe there are some settings in ACAD or View we have to consider?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards

Alex