Win7, VMWare and SIMATIC Software

Hello

I am using a Dell Latitude E5500 laptop at work. It has Core2DUO CPU P8700 and 4 GBs of DDR2 RAM. The current OS is Win XP SP3 and most of the SIMATIC software are installed.(Step7,WinCC,WinCC Flex,Simatic Net,...) and of course there are many software installed.

The question is we are thinking of upgrading to Win7 since it can give more performance to this hardware but most of the simatic software wont run at Win7 so we should install VMware workstation also and a Win XP in it. I know there are some people here which had already went this way. I am asking their opinion about this issue. Which system will give more performance and which system will be more flexible? I am using a CP5512 PCMCIA card to communicate with Siemens PLCs will this hardware work with VMware win XP without troubling me in the middle of a commisiniong? I am asking you to comment on this issue and tell me the disadv. and adv. you came across.

Looking forward to hearing your comments about this subject.

Thanks everyone.

PCMCIA cards will NOT work inside a VMWare virtual machine.

That is bad news. Then idea of upgrading to Win7 is doomed at least for now. Is there any other way we can manage this problem any yother software, etc... or is it best to stick to XP?

Thanks.

I recently got an E5510 with Win7 Pro (32-bit). I tried installing Step7 Basic v10.5 SP2 directly in Win7. It installed and runs fine, but it won't communicate with my S7-1200 over Ethernet. When you 'search for accessible nodes', it sees the PLC, but it can't read the configuration. Bottom line is I couldn't get it to work in Win7...

I then installed 'XP Mode' from Microsoft, and installed Step 7 in the VM. It works, and can communicate with the PLC just fine. My only issue is that it runs REALLY slow, to the point of being unusable. This is probably due to the fact that I only gave the VM 1 GB of memory. My laptop only has 3 GB, so if I give the VM 2 GB, I don't have enough memory to run the VM. I guess I'll have to bump it up to 4 GB soon. I'd prefer to switch over to Win7 64-bit so I can add even more memory, but some of my software that WILL run on Win7 doesn't support 64-bit...

I'm not overly thrilled with Microsoft's 'XP Mode', so I may try VMware instead. We'll see how it goes...



-Eric

That's the only issue I've found using VMware Workstation is that I can't use PCMCIA cards. Since these cards are falling more and more disuse, it probably will never be supported. Oh, well.

That's right. As far as I understand it, none of the virtualization platforms intend on supporting PC Cards.

jkerekes said:

That's the only issue I've found using VMware Workstation is that I can't use PCMCIA cards. Since these cards are falling more and more disuse, it probably will never be supported. Oh, well.

Click to expand...