Microsoft .net Framework version 2.0

[vittovangind]

Hello,

I am on Mac and I need to run an application which requires .net 2.0.

Could I run it with VMware Fusion?

Would I need to install Windows XP? What are my options?

Thank you for your help!

vittovangind

[bittondb]

It would be nice if Apple allowed for it. IIRC, Vista Enterprise allows for 5 VM instances of itself.

[getwired]

Tangent perhaps - but I wouldn't necessarily agree with that. if you are running as a User and have the Windows Firewall enabled, it's not nearly the concern that it is if you are running as an administrator...

[WoodyZ]

Tangent perhaps - but I wouldn't necessarily agree with that. if you are running as a User and have the Windows Firewall enabled, it's not nearly the concern that it is if you are running as an administrator...

How naive, I guess the saying is true, ignorance is bliss!

[rcardona2k]

There have been plenty of privilege escalation exploits in the past to gain administrative rights on the system. If you surf to a bad enough site on Windows you will be compromised, firewall or not, non-admin or not.

[vittovangind]

Hello guys,

I am creating a Windows virtual machine using Windows Easy Install however on stpe five "advanced disk options" I don't know what to choose: "Allocate all disk space now" or "split disk into 2GB files".

It is said that if I use the forst option i wan't be able to use the VMware Tools shrink disk feature later. What is this feature and is it important?

And other the other hand what is the advantage of the second option?

When looking at performance which one of the above mentioned option would fit better?

Thanks for your advise

[rcardona2k]

The advantage if NOT pre-allocating is that you only use OS X hard drive space as you install programs in the guest operating system. The problem is when you delete items, the space is not recovered on OS X, so you have to "shrink" the disk back to just the space used in the guest.

Split disks are compatible for transporting them on USB drives formatted as FAT32 where the single largest file limit is 4 GB. VMware limits its splits to 2 GB to be compatible with network file systems too.

IMO, performance-wise, a pre-allocated, non-split VMDK on a RAID subsystem is the fastest performing virtual disk. This how VMware's enterprise product function (more or less). Obviously this requires some investment. The tradeoff is pre-allocated virtual disk on your OS X disk, defragmented with iDefrag and defragging in the guest (I use Diskeeper for XP). This is a winning combination for me.

I should note, VMware offers an option to convert your disk between these formats (pre-allocated, dynamic) and (monolith, split) using the command-linen tool vmware-vdiskmanager. The GUI wrapper for the command line tool is available here:

edit: Added reference to vmware-vdiskmanager and GUI version.

[admin]

You might also want to read , which has a brief section on disk types; note the two options you mention are orthogonal. I personally prefer split-sparse.