Luvin 3.1, but just a few questions about machines with bootcamp...

[Herojig]

Hi all, v3.1 is fantastic and all working well. But i have a few questions as the defacto admin in a studio with lotsa imacs. What i do for machines with boot camp is create a WINCLONE of an image for deployment, and then do restores on the machine with bootcamp when I want to update them. Works perfect:)

But, I am wondering if using VMWare to do updates on my master image will in any way mess things up, in other words, when a bootcamp partition drive is running virtual in the VMWare interface, will installing software and whatnot be the same as if installing software if booted native? In even more words, will having VMWare tools installed on the Boot Camp partition do anything to disrupt things when that boot camp is run native?

Many of the Boot Camps that I update do not have VMWare installed, as they are used primarilly on the PC side anyway, for these folks that I can't/never will wean off windows. I want to make sure that I am not introducing problems by using VMWare on the master boot camp partition that i use to clone.

And just a note: while I love ur product, I can't tell you how much not having firewire support in virtual images is messing with out A/V heads. We absolutly need to have firewire support of audio and video workstations. If there was such support, I would never have to mess with boot camp again!

Well, thx, and hope to hear from you soon.

Jigs

[rcardona2k · Accepted solution]

But, I am wondering if using VMware (Fusion) to do updates on my master image will in anyway mess things up, in other words, when a Boot Camp partition drive is running virtual in the VMware (Fusion) interface, will installing software and what not be the same as if installing software if booted native? In even more words, will having VMware Tools installed on the Boot Camp partition do anything to disrupt things when that boot camp is run native?

Yes, you can perform software maintenance (e.g. Microsoft patches) for the Boot Camp partition in VMware Fusion nearly the same as being booted natively into the machine. The only differences are detection for device drivers that need access to the host hardware to be updated (these should be very rare). In general updating things like Windows, Office, Adobe CS/Acrobat, etc will be fine.

As for the VMware Tools in Boot Camp, the virtual drivers are designed to remain latent (inactive) with no problems, i.e. not loaded == not used. There is one issue: software activation updates. VMware swaps activation files for Windows and Office to preserve activation in each environment. If you move activated copies of Vista, 7, Office 2007/2010 via WinClone this will trigger re-activation. In addition booting into VMware Fusion will require one more activation per machine so both VMware and BC environments are activated. As long as you dont replace the Boot Camp partitions, the activations should remain. For this kind activation usage, it's preferred to a Key Management Service (KMS) to manage your site licenses since retail copies have limited number of activations.

[Herojig]

Perfect! Thx for the reply. Very cool stuff from an admin point of view, and glad to hear all of the above. 90% of the updates I do are for things like new plugins, presets, settings, little things like that. Cheers!

jigs