I wrote a blog post on how I get my SharePoint development done with a Mac and I was interested in some feedback. The setup works great for me but I occasionally get bogged down with disk space issues. If anyone has a suggestions or advice with how they do it, it would be much appreciated. I’m considering off-loading the AD controller to a cloud based environment since I’m connected 99% of time I’m developing. Perhaps a small Azure VM would do the trick.
You can find the original post here:Â http://s7sys.biz/sp13devonmacÂ
Thanks for the thoughts!
~Jason
Yes, I run VM Fusion and don’t have much of an issue with it. Most often, I’m on external monitors while in the VMs but during the off chance I’m just on the MBP, the VMs stay steady at 1680 x 1050.
Wouldn’t consider going back to a Lenovo…
Hi Jason, glad to meet a fellow Mac’er
My setup is similar, I have a Macbook Pro w/Retina 16GB with 256GB internal SSD.
I run my VM’s on external Thunderbolt SSD drives (Samsung 840 Pro 512GB), these VM’s are self contained (AD, SQL, SP etc) so I only have to run 1 at a time.
I have a couple of other external Seagate Freeagent spindle drives containing ISO’s and other less used VM’s which I also hook using Thunderbolt – Seagate do a TB drive caddy which allows you to slot in external drives.
Thunderbolt SSD’s perform as near as possible to the internal SSD, so this make a big difference, even over SSD on USB3.
The only issue I have is with the Retina display and how its handled in guest VMs – and that is that Windows is set with a very high (198%) DPI setting. A lot of Windows software doesn’t cope well with high DPI settings, so the display results can sometimes be dissappointing.
IE works fine, as does most of the stock Windows apps, Visual Studio 2012 works fine for the most part but some of the Debug/Watch windows don’t display their content correctly – as of VS Update 2 anyway.
I use Parallels, which allows you to disable Retina support for VM’s, and when you do that guest O/S’s work just fine, but you quickly get used to the Retina display, the resolution is simply awesome – at the moment I’m just putting with the odd times when Retina support isn’t working with some windows apps.
Fusion may handle Retina support differently, but I doubt much differently.
I’ve contemplated getting a Lenovo W series laptop, but so far I’ve not been able to bring myself to do it, too much of an MBP fan.
Phil.
I’m running the 2012 MBP Retina… 2.3GHz/16GB/256GB
The USB 3.0 on the external SSD performs quite well. If I have search crawling, there’s some lag but with that disabled, it’s responsive.
Jason, which mac do you have, I didn’t see that in the article.
I have a 2011 2.5 ghz i7 old style macbook pro with 16GB ram.
I replaced the internal hard drive with an Intel 600GB SSD when they came out a while back.
I see that Crucial has a 960GB SSD that’s now cheaper and faster than the intel was so I may upgrade to get more performance at some point.
Performance of SP2010 has been fine, SP2013, with search, was a complete Dog until I bumped the VM’s ram up to 12 GB.Â
For backups, I started with Mozy, then moved to back blaze, backblaze doesn’t backup VM’s by default, but you can change that. Â One trick I use, is to create an image, get it right then take a snapshot.
What this does is “freeze” the files so that my incremental backups only need to copy the difference files generated by the snapshot.
Every 6 months or so I delete then recreate the snapshot.
