VirtualBox or Bootcamp?

[slooksterPSV]

Hello all,

High Sierra works great and does what I need it to do. However there is one thing I need Windows for. It’s a goal I have for work where I need to use Windows to accomplish. So I have the mid 2009 MacBook with 4Gb of RAM and a 500 GB HDD. My question is this:

Is boot camp still supported or should I just use VirtualBox? I want to replicate a few server like functions we use but we use Windows. Even allocating 2Gb of RAM in a virtual will make things a bit tough but doable.

Thoughts?

Thanks

 

[throAU]

What are the requirements for your Windows app? Does it need to get to the internet? If not, you could perhaps save RAM and disk requirements by installing it in a copy of XP, (and don’t let XP connect to the internet for security reasons) if it is XP compatible.

If you can, i’d give it a go with virtualbox before boot-camp. Virtualbox or Fusion or Parallels will be a lot more convenient than rebooting, and you don’t need to split your system drive into a partition that won’t be entirely full - the virtual disk file will only consume the space that is used within Windows.

A third option is perhaps WINE - via Winebottler or something.

This is Windows emulation to run an application without actually installing Windows. Requires less space, a little trickier to set up and may or may not work, but if it does work, it will require less RAM, less drive space and doesn’t require a license of Windows. Some of the Mac ports of Windows games run using WINE...

 

[slooksterPSV]

Alrighty. Well one is a team city server and another is a sql server. But I need visual studio build items. Team city alone is a ram hog. SQL, not so much.

 

[throAU]

Hmm. I’d say WINE is out for that. You may be forced into boot-camp due to the memory requirements. 4 GB is going to be very tight trying to run that in a VM in 4 GB of system RAM.

If your macbook is one of the ones that can actually take 8 GB, i’d suggest doing that and using a VM (8 GB of ram is CHEAP these days), but if not, boot-camp might be the way to go. Ideally you’d also want an SSD for it if doing VM as well due to the competing IO requests from both SQL and your host OS. But yeah, at that point you’re starting to throw real money at a pretty old machine.

Not sure if you’re aware, but by default an SQL install will attempt to consume all available RAM for SQL for database performance reasons (cache, basically its memory consumption will just grow and grow) - look up how to limit its memory consumption if you’re not aware of how to tune it. It does this because it assumes its the only application running on a box it is installed on.

 

[slooksterPSV]

Maybe instead of all this maybe I’ll just use my XPS as a remote point. Then I can do a virtual for the other test functions so it would be like a semi real environment.

How hard is it to do Bootcamp though?

Edit: since I’m doing fake data I usually only limit sql to a max of 1GB I can get away with less as I’m using a small database with few tables and around 200,000 records