Apple computer

Has anyone used an apple computer VM fusion ware or parallels using windows xp running allen bradley software such as rs logix 500, 5000 and rsview stuido? I am thinking of buying an imac.

Thanks
Jim Cav

Running it right now. In my opinion running yur program software in VM ware is the best way to go. I have a VM image for RS500, RS5000 The part I really like is I can allocate specific Comms to each VM image so RSLInks does not take over everything.

I do the same with my Siemens software as well.

I have a dell computer though not an apple, but if the drivers they make for the apple are half as good as what I am using now you sould have no issues. My nefew runs Linix and my VM images work great on his laptop.

Note: If you create your VM images on an externial hard drive any PC that has vm player can run your VM images. I find this real handy. Now I can carry a hard drive that has everything I need and can switch between PC's.

For me its like carrying around a Win98 box and 6 WinXP boxes around in my pocket.

I don't have any direct experience doing so.

Amazon.com has gone to Macintosh for all PCs across the enterprise, including in manufacturing, so a former colleague of mine who manages much of their warehouse automation is running RSLogix 5000 and RSLinx under Parallels on MacBook Pro computers.

I have so many hardware driver needs that just don't exist outside the IBM platform and Windows that I can't have any primary OS except XP-SP2.

I have just ordered an iMac27 - long lead time

I have a mini mac with VMWare fusion on it, set up XP SP2 and installed Logix 500 and Linx without any issues, others here have Step7 running under fusion.

I have a Mac Pro with 8 GB now. I was limited to running only 1 VM at a time with only 4GB. I could run two but the disk thrashes and the system slows to a crawl.

I have a WinXP VM for doing PLC work, one for doing Mathcad and C programming for new projects. I have a Win98 for the old projects and a Ubuntu VM just to see what it is all about.
The PLC VM has RS500 and RS5000 installed on it but I haven't used either in a very long time. Most recently I was using Step7 on the Ethernet project.


There is something about PC where even if you put in 4GB of ram you only get to use 3.5 GB. Maybe this will change with Windoze7 but for right now I like running OS X. I do think that Windoze7 is closing the gap but Windoze has a major weak spot, the registry. It is flawed in it implementation. The OS X libraries are much simpler and robust.

The new Snow Leopard makes it easy to make movie screen captures. One can then edit them with iMovie09. I have ScreenFlow so I haven't tried using the OS X only method. 504bloke, you should give it a try.

What consistantly bothers me about Windoze is that that I am often waiting for Windoze to respond and it doesn't even thought the CPU and hard disk is hardly working. What good is a operating system that can't multitask? If I wrote software like that I know that no one one buy our products. Mac OS X multitasks more more evenly and smoothly but it is still not perfect.

Peter, the 3,5GB memory limit is on 32bit windows versions. It comes from how 32bit processor can address memory.

with 64bit windows you get it all.

VMWare

I do not have an apple but a hp with Windows7 on it. It is a quad core. I was told that normally only one or two cores are used by todays programms.
Programms have to do threading to use the second processor.
I wondered if you run a virtual pc like VMWare, could it be that the virtual pc uses one of the free cores of the cpu? Can I see somwhere how much cores are actually used on my pc?

Peter Nachtwey said:

The new Snow Leopard makes it easy to make movie screen captures. One can then edit them with iMovie09. I have ScreenFlow so I haven't tried using the OS X only method. 504bloke, you should give it a try.

Click to expand...

Screenflow looks good Peter, i shall give it a try when i get my iMac27, 16Gb of Ram as well

Plc_User said:

I do not have an apple but a hp with Windows7 on it. It is a quad core. I was told that normally only one or two cores are used by todays programms.
Programms have to do threading to use the second processor.
I wondered if you run a virtual pc like VMWare, could it be that the virtual pc uses one of the free cores of the cpu? Can I see somwhere how much cores are actually used on my pc?

Click to expand...

I do not know if you can see it but I know you can select it. It has made a difference in some of the software I am running to select both cores when I am in a VM mode

I have a Mac Pro with 8 GB now. I was limited to running only 1 VM at a time with only 4GB. I could run two but the disk thrashes and the system slows to a crawl.

Click to expand...

You might want to double check your VM setup. I have 4G ram and run 3 VM's at the same time. I have my WinCC in one and my S7-200 in another and my desktop as the third. One thing I did find weird that I have not been able to figure out is when I run Auto Cad and it is using auto save it causes me to slow down. I know it is a network issue because if I save to the VM harddrive and have auto save pointed to it I do not have those issues.

Your issue maybe something along those lines.

Also, I found out one other thing the hard way. I created a VM image of my old laptop. This one grinded kinda hard until I went in and deleted all the hardware drives and services I did not need. VM would load and start these at startup. This helped also with the run speed. This image is my desktop VM. I did it this way to keep from having to setup all the stuff I normally run on my desktop.

It is easy to see the CPU power being used on a Mac.

Actually it is easy to see CPU usage on a PC too but there is a Menu App called iStat Menus that can show the CPU, memory, network and disk usage on the menu bar. I have 4 cores too and I set each VM to use 2 cores. Even so I rarely work all four cores at 100%. Most programs only use 1 CPU. I can often see the CPU usage pegged at 25% when a program get hung up in an infinite loop or is trying to solve an unsolvable problem.

I watch the activity meters whenever I am waiting. Nothing upsets me more than a computer that isn't working at 100% when I am waiting.

Apple needs to make two big improvements in its computers.
1 The key boards and mice 'draw a perfect vacuum'.
2 The disk drives are not as fast as the rest of the machine. Mac have fast CPUs and fast memory but one spends too much time waiting for the disk drives.

If you are a Mac user download
http://www.islayer.com/apps/istatmenus/
It is free but I contributed $10.

I have a Mac Mini at home.
It has a 5400 RPM disk but 1066 MHz memory. What gives?
My first Mac Mini had only a 4500 RPM drive. Pathetic. My first PPC Mac Mini had 166 Mhz ram. Very pathetic. Even our motion controller goes faster and uses DDR. Our motion controller uses a MPC5200 which is an industrial version of the G2 PPC.
A Mac Mini would really go if the drives were replaced with a SSD.

The key to getting a good PC is balance. If one is developing software then disk speed is key. One should look into raid 0. You can't do that with a Mac Mini or a iMac. If you do video processing then memory may be the limiting factor. I look at the ratio of page ins to page out. Right now it is about 1000 to 1 which means I am not paging out very often so I am not using that much memory. If the ratio of page ins to page outs drops to about 10 to 1 you don't have enough memory. Fortunately for Mac users, Mac OS X takes about 1 GB less to run than Windoze but even so there are applications that use a lot of memory and VMWare is one of them. A VM should have about 2 GB to run windoze as a minimum. If you don't allocate that much memory for your Windoze VM then you will end up paging out a lot in the Windoze VM.

Ken Roach said:

Amazon.com has gone to Macintosh for all PCs across the enterprise, including in manufacturing, so a former colleague of mine who manages much of their warehouse automation is running RSLogix 5000 and RSLinx under Parallels on MacBook Pro computers.

Click to expand...

Your former colleague may be running a MacBook, but I'm pretty certain that Amazon.com has not switched to Macintosh 'across the enterprise'. I know some some folks that work in one of the local warehouses, and after asking they're telling me there's nary a mac in the whole place.

There are some great mac keyboard shortcuts here

Peter Nachtwey said:

....hung up in an infinite loop or is trying to solve an unsolvable problem.

Click to expand...

would that unsolvable problem be maglub.exe?

I have XP at home with a 2 year old DIY PC and I multitask all the time. It's quite typical for me to burn a DVD, download a huge file, and play COD4 at the same time. Yes, there are time a normally ok process will hog the processor or memeory but I assume you can have that problem with MAC too, right?

jimcav said:

Has anyone used an apple computer VM fusion ware or parallels using windows xp running allen bradley software such as rs logix 500, 5000 and rsview stuido? I am thinking of buying an imac.

Thanks
Jim Cav

Click to expand...

One thing not answered above is whether or not you need to use the 1784 PCMK card for DH+ communication. PCMCIA cards are not supported by VMware. There are several posts in this forum about people using a USB to PCMCIA adapter, do a search. Last one I read was within a week.

Other than the PCMCIA limitation the VM should work fine for Rockwell products with serial, usb, or ethernet comms. Like many have posted above, I also use separate VM's for many programming packages including Rockwell. No more dual-booting or swapping hard drives.