Hello, Anyone have a recommendation for an external hard drive that could be loaded with a VMWare Virtual Machine File? My (soon to be) Wife is taking a required 'Computer basics' course at the local university and they require Windows & MS Office 2013. She has a MacBook Air with about 100GB of storage, and is utilizing most of that space right now. (and she does not have VMWare/ Virtual Machine files on her computer right now) So I was thinking rather than trying to clear off most of her computer just to temporarily fit Windows & Office, that we could just install VMWare on her machine and have the Virtual Machine sitting on an external USB3/Thunderbolt drive.

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The VM doesn't need to run lightning fast, but it does need to be adequate for her to not lag behind in the basics course as they are showing features of office, etc. Any thoughts? Thanks Ark I was thinking something like this perhaps:.

Would a fast SD card be 'fast enough'? Something like this perhaps: Computer Details: MacBook Air Mid 2012 13 inch. Proc: 1.8 GHz Core i5 Mem: 4 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 Gfx: Intel HD 4000 512MB OS: 10.8.4 (Plan to upgrade to Mavericks) Using VMWare Fusion 5.0.3 Professional Either Win 7 or win 8 (64 bit or 32bit, whatever would be fastest and most light weight) It looks like the internal SD Card reader is hooked up through USB3.0 SuperSpeed Bus. Reader shows in System Profiler as capable of 5 Gb/s.

I've tried this on an external USB 3.0 HD, an SD card (Class 10) and a USB 2.0 thumb drive on my rMBP. I have not tried this on a USB 3.0 thumb drive. Also, this was done using Parallels and not VMWare, but I don't think that makes much of a difference. Now, 'fast enough' is relative, but for my use cases, I found that the SD card and USB thumb drive were a bit laggy.

The USB 3.0 HD, however, was very usable. There was a little bit of noticeable latency, but throughput was great. In fact, the botteneck is not with the USB 3.0 but the HD speeds.

So, performance should be similar to that of a built-in HD (save the latency). Now, I have not tried this on a fast USB 3.0 flash drive, but I have a hard time believing that it will be much faster than a USB 3.0 HD in real-world applications. And when it comes to write performance, I think a HD will have the upper hand. BTW: This is a hotly debated issue, but there are some who say that using a standard flash drive (SD or USB) for such applications is not recommended because of write wear issues. I don't really have an opinion on this, so I'll just let you research this.

We're talking about running a vm off an external disk and thus this already excludes the use of usb thumbdrives and any form of memory card. They are technically incapable of providing what is needed for running a vm (it might run but you're asking for problems). Hypervisors like VMware ESXi do not allow you to use these as a datastore (the datastore is where you store and run your vm's from) for this exact reason. Memory cards and usb thumbdrives cause issues with vm's. There are only 3 options: external hdd, external ssd or network storage (NAS, SAN). Both the hdd and ssd can be put in a housing with fw800, usb3 or thunderbolt. The cheapest option would be an external usb3 hdd; a usb3 housing with an ssd would be cheap and fast; with thunderbolt it would be the fastest and also the most expensive option.

Sorry I don't know if some people haven't kept up with Flash drive technology. I have 3 of these I use one for Windows 8, One for Windows 2012 and one for Windows XP.

I have no issues with any of them and Parallels. I bought these after seeing their high write speeds on this review. Because you have to go through installing for a VM and installing additional programs on top of it, it is worth losing a little read speed compare to the other flash drives to get such a high write speed. These flash drives will run better than a traditional hard drive inside a pc as they usually cap out out and a lower read/write performance. Sorry I don't know if some people haven't kept up with Flash drive technology.

I have 3 of these I use one for Windows 8, One for Windows 2012 and one for Windows XP. I have no issues with any of them and Parallels. I bought these after seeing their high write speeds on this review. Because you have to go through installing for a VM and installing additional programs on top of it, it is worth losing a little read speed compare to the other flash drives to get such a high write speed.

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These flash drives will run better than a traditional hard drive inside a pc as they usually cap out out and a lower read/write performance. Dyn, you can run a VM (using Fusion, at least) on a Mac where the VM's image is on a USB thumb drive. I have tried it, using the modes where the VM's virtual disk is one file, and also and a collection of fixed-size (2G I think) files. Unfortunately, the performance was terrible, too slow to be useful. This is with USB2.

I current am doing this with a Seagate USB drive, still USB 2. It is OK, performance is pretty poor but useable.

I also have a VM which has a small image on the Mac's SSD, and this runs fine, so I'm pretty sure the performance issue is disk IO over USB. Click to expand.You can also drink a bottle of dish washer detergent. Just because you can still doesn't mean it is a good idea to do so.

Running it from a usb thumb drive isn't recommended because it is very unreliable and most thumb drives are just too slow for it (it's more because of the iops than because of speed in MB/s; also why usb thumb drives are unreliable). There is too much differentiation with thumb drives. If you want to do things like this you need to get a proper one which is quite difficult. There is a good reason why nobody, not even virtualisation manufacturers, recommend the use of a thumb drive for something like this. If you want to do this then fine but it is entirely at your own risk.

Now with that in mind let's have a look at prices for a usb3 stick.it's about the same as for a normal usb3 external disk drive that IS officially supported by the virtualisation manufacturers. So is it smart to buy a usb stick for this?

The iops of the usb 3.0 flash drives I listed are still 2-4 times faster than the traditional 7200 rpm hard drive. You are right there is too much differentiation which can lead to confusion. I had to do research and some of the flash drives were too similarly named. There are also a lot of usb 3.0 flash drives that only get 20/10 mb read write speed.

The cost difference is more beneficial to get an external SSD drive but if you want a portable vm with as little footprint as possible a usb 3.0 flash drive is the way to go. Sorry I don't know if some people haven't kept up with Flash drive technology. I have 3 of these I use one for Windows 8, One for Windows 2012 and one for Windows XP. I have no issues with any of them and Parallels. I bought these after seeing their high write speeds on this review. Because you have to go through installing for a VM and installing additional programs on top of it, it is worth losing a little read speed compare to the other flash drives to get such a high write speed.

These flash drives will run better than a traditional hard drive inside a pc as they usually cap out out and a lower read/write performance. Thanks everyone for all your thoughts and suggestions! For those worried about what is 'recommended or not'. What I'm looking to do would just be a temporary solution as long as it survives through January 2014 and can handle some basic Windows 8 tasks, power point, word, excel for a student then it will have served its purpose. No real 'important information', will be on it, so other than the bummer of some time and having to exchange the device (warranty) having the device fail would't be that big of a deal. I also plan on setting up the VM on another machine, and keeping a copy of the VM file there. Just copy the VM file to the external storage and then she can just get to it for the couple classes she has that go through Windows/Office basics.

How To Install VMWare Fusion with Ubuntu on a Mac Eirik Didriksen 1 Hans Petter Langtangen 1, 2 1 Simula Research Laboratory 2 University of Oslo Jan 15, 2015 Installation of VMWare Fusion Buy, download, and install (write the serial number during installation). To get quickly started, you download a trial version for free and later buy it and register the serial number (easy). Installation of Ubuntu Go to and choose the latest 64-bit Desktop version of Ubuntu. Save the downloaded Ubuntu file at some place you can recognize later. Other Linux distributions. We strongly recommend to use a Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution, because Debian has by far the largest collection of prebuilt mathematical software. Among the Debian-based distributions, we recommend Ubuntu, simply because switching keyboard layouts is more reliable or easier in Ubuntu than in, e.g., Lubuntu, Xubuntu, and Linux Mint (a configured layout might be gone after a reboot).

Switching keyboard layouts are particularly convenient when doing programming with an English/American keyboard, with braces and brackets in natural places, and then writing emails using a native keyboard with special characters. Quick description. Launch VMWare Fusion (the instructions here are for version 7). Click on File - New and choose to Install from disc or image.

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Click on Use another disc or disc image and choose your.iso file with the Ubuntu image. Choose Easy Install, fill in password, and check the box for sharing files with the host operating system. Choose Customize Settings and make the following settings (these settings can be changed later, if desired):. Processors and Memory: Set a minimum of 2 Gb memory, but not more than half of your computer's total memory. The virtual machine can use all processors.

Hard Disk: Choose how much disk space you want to use inside the virtual machine (20 Gb is considered a minimum). Choose where you want to store virtual machine files on the hard disk.

The default location is usually fine. The directory with the virtual machine files needs to be frequently backed up so make sure you know where it is. Ubuntu will now install itself without further dialog, but it will take some time.

You may need to define a higher resolution of the display in the Ubuntu machine. Find the System settings icon on the left, go to Display, choose some display (you can try several, click Keep this configuration when you are satisfied). You can have multiple keyboards on Ubuntu.

Launch System settings, go to Keyboard, click the Text entry hyperlink, add keyboard(s) ( Input sources to use), and choose a shortcut, say Ctrl+space or Ctrl+backslash, in the Switch to next source using field. Then you can use the shortcut to quickly switch keyboard. A terminal window is key for programmers. Click on the Ubuntu icon on the top of the left pane, search for gnome-terminal, right-click its new icon in the left pane and choose Lock to Launcher such that you always have the terminal easily accessible when you log in. The gnome-terminal can have multiple tabs ( Ctrl+shift+t to make a new tab). Installing software on Ubuntu You now have a full Ubuntu machine, but there is not much software on a it. Installation is performed through the Ubuntu Software Center (a graphical application) or through Unix commands, typically.

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Terminal sudo apt-get install packagename To look up the right package name, run apt-cache search followed by typical words of that package. The strength of the apt-get way of installing software is that the package and all packages it depends on are automatically installed through the apt-get install command. This is in a nutshell why Ubuntu (or Debian-based Linux systems) are so user-friendly for installing sophisticated mathematical software. To install a lot of useful packages for scientific work, go to and click on one of the following files, which will install a collection of software for scientific work using apt-get:.

installminimal.sh: install a minimal collection (recommended). installrich.sh: install a rich collection (takes time to run) Then click the Raw button.

The file comes up in the browser window, right-click and choose Save As. To save the file on your computer. The next step is to find the file and run it. Terminal cd /Downloads Terminal bash installminimal.sh The program will run for quite some time, hopefully without problems. If it stops, set a comment sign # in front of the line where it stopped and rerun. File sharing The Ubuntu machine can see the files on your host system if you download VMWare Tools.

Go to the Virtual Machine pull-down menu in VMWare Fusion and choose Install VMWare Tools. A tarfile is downloaded. Click on it and it will open a folder vmware-tools-distrib, normally in your home folder. Move to the new folder and run sudo perl vmware-install.pl. You can go with the default answers to all the questions. On a Mac, you must open Virtual Machine - Settings. And choose Sharing to bring up a dialog where you can add the folders you want to be visible in Ubuntu.

Just choose your home folder. Then turn on the file sharing button (or turn off and on again). Go to Ubuntu and check if you can see all your host system's files in /mnt/hgfs/.

If you later detect that /mnt/hgfs/ folder has become empty, VMWare Tools must be reinstalled by running sudo perl vmware-install.pl as above. Backup of a VMWare virtual machine on a Mac. The entire Ubuntu machine is a folder on the host computer, typically with a name like Documents/Virtual Machines/Ubuntu 64-bit. Backing up the Ubuntu machine means backing up this folder. However, if you use tools like Time Machine and work in Ubuntu during backup, the copy of the state of the Ubuntu machine is likely to be corrupt.

You are therefore strongly recommended to shut down the virtual machine prior to running Time Machine or simply copying the folder with the virtual machine to some backup disk. If something happens to your virtual machine, it is usually a straightforward task to make a new machine and import data and software automatically from the previous machine.

Troubleshooting Internet Does not Work in Ubuntu. Invoke the VMWare Fusion menu Virtual Machine - Settings - Network and test Share the Mac's network connection versus Connect directly to the physical network (Bridged).