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cpmame
Contributor
Contributor
‎04-17-2017 01:05 PM

Can I use the same VM on external HDD at home and at work?

I have a Mac at home, and Win7 PC at work. I would like to setup a Win7 VM for software development, and save it on external SSD so that I can use the same development environment at home and at work. Can VMware help me accomplish that? What is the strategy and which product do I need?

Thanks

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bluefirestorm
Champion
Champion
‎04-17-2017 05:11 PM

Simple answer: You can have Fusion/Fusion Pro at home with the Mac and Workstation Player/Pro at the PC at work. I will leave it to you to decide on feature sets based on your current and future needs.

There are complications:

  1. The external hard disk will likely have to be formatted in exFAT so that both Mac and Win 7 and read/write the external SSD. FAT32 has a file size limit of 4GB. Every time a VM is started a file with VMEM extension is created equivalent to the memory allocated to the VM. So if you assign 6GB to the VM, it will create an 6GB vmem file where the VM runs.
  2. Windows 7 (and eventually Windows 10) could have activation issues. I can't remember if it made any difference in answering "I moved it" or "I copied it" in terms of activation for Windows 7. I have moved/copied a few times Windows 10 VMs from Mac to Windows 10 (upgraded from Win 7) or Windows to Mac. I think the "I moved it" will not prompt for Windows license key again. But I don't know if in the background whether activation is still being triggered. There is a script (you can google for it) that will show the number of activation triggers used. I think there is a limit of 1000 activation triggers.
  3. You will always have ghost devices in the Win 7 VM from the host machines. For example, the virtual processor of the Mac will be a hidden virtual processor when the VM is running on Win 7 host and vice-versa.
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cpmame
Contributor
Contributor
‎04-17-2017 05:57 PM

Hi bluefirestorm,

Thanks for your reply.

1. I am using Paragon NTFS on my mac so far I have no problem writing to the external NTFS partition.

2. Currently I am using VirtualBox to setup my Win7 VM and save the VM image on external SSD. Both my mac at home and Win PC at work share the same VM image file. Both PC and mac has its own vbox file and I also saved them on the external SSD. So far I have no activation issue. But VM on VirtualBox is kinda sluggish. My Parallels 12 is running much smoother unfortunately it can only run on mac. That's why I am exploring VMware right now.

3. ok...

4. If I were to use the VMware solution, then I have to buy both Fusion ($79) and Workstation Player ($150). Gosh! Any better alternative?

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