The Mac Lab has VMware Fusion installed and there’s a VM image pre-setup to
allow you to access any Windows programs/features. It’s recommend that you not
use the VM for applications that are native to the Mac (Web browsers, Matlab,
Email, etc.) because of the overhead of running them on the VM.
Using VMware
Import the VM
- Each user must import the VM into their VMWare settings.
- From the Finder menu, select «Go → Applications» and start VMWare
Fusion
- Select Open Existing Virtual Machine
- Navigate to /Volumes/vmware and select Windows 7 x64.vmwarevm
- The first time starting the VM, VMware may ask if you moved or copied the
image, select «copied».
- There may be several pop-up warnings about running on a remote disk,
registering the product, updating the product, etc. Typically you can
ignore/deny/defer all the pop-ups and they won’t affect the operation.
Starting the VM
- From the Finder menu, select «Go → Utilites», and start VMWare Fusion
- Click the Play button next on the Windows 7 x64 virtual machine.
- Wait for windows to boot up.
- At this point you should hopefully have an operational Windows 7 VM
running.
- When finished, make sure you Shutdown the Windows using the Windows-START
menu. If you close/suspend the image, it will try to save the 5+GigaBytes
of state data back to network and delay the close for several minutes!
Notes/Caveats:
- If you later use another MAC in the lab, the VMware program may again ask
if you moved or copied the image.
Always select «copied» and it should work correctly. Since some of the Macs
are newer hardware, VMware may complain about missing ide0 (CDROM) devices,
newer CPU drivers, lower resolution video, etc., but you can select the
default at each warning and the image should work correctly.
- Always store important data in the VM, on the shared link located on the
Desktop. This will put the data in the /Users/Shared public directory on
the mac, you can copy data from there to your home directory.
- The VM images are protected by DeepFreeze, all data will be LOST on them
when the mac is reset, please save your data somewhere safe.
