MacBook for PLC programming

labik

Member
Join Date
Nov 2011
Location
Pabianice
Posts
8
Hello,

I was wondering if any of you guys have been using Macbooks for PLC programming. For example with Windows set on VMWare or other wirtual machine. How about stability of such solution? Is mac stability + virtual machine worth having?

What about communications with PLC from Siemens, Schneider, Mitsubishi etc.?
 
I have a Macbook Pro (late 2013) with Fusion 6.0 Pro. I have VMs running windows XP and Windows 7. Use the VMs to program AB PLCs and Rockwell Software. Works like a champ. Very reliable so far. About six months.
 
I use a MBP running Win7 in boot camp for CAD, Rockwell, Codesys, etc.

Zero issues other than it being Windows at times.
 
I have a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and a Mac Mini setup running VM's for Automation programming purposes. Works great.

Very reliable hardware and you can run all the windoze based software you need.
 
Well this hipster uses VirtualBox to sling VMs between Windows and OSX. I used to use VMWare (and really liked the features of the Windows desktop version, but I disliked that it was "incompatible" with Fusion on OSX) I have spun up Debian, W7 (32 and 64), XP and even W98 for one particularly old HMI.

And as of the benefits of VMs, I keep each of my different customers work in separate VMs so I am not polluting across customers.

I also spin up VMs almost as a disposable system to test installing different versions of software. I learnt that the hard way a few years ago when a customer wanted me to install their version of Cimplicity in order to check something out - and the installation barfed in a way that creamed my entire laptop. Thank god for backups!
 
Last edited:
I have a Macbook Pro (late 2013) with Fusion 6.0 Pro. I have VMs running windows XP and Windows 7. Use the VMs to program AB PLCs and Rockwell Software. Works like a champ. Very reliable so far. About six months.

ditto. There are a couple of tricks to work out with networking and so on, but it wipes the floor with any other setup I've used. I have 16GB of ram so can run two 8GB VM's simultaneously and the only issues I ever have are just Windows being, well, Windows :) and because the new MBP's are all solid state, battery life is great. I can be running a VM and online for a good 4-6 hours before I have to go looking for my charger
 
Do you need a Windows license for each VM you install?

Licensing is a pain.

See this link from Microsoft for more info on "desktop" virtualization

Depending on the OS - it can depend if you have "software assurance" - which can give you up to 4 properly licensed VMs.

Server licensing, IMO, is a bit easier to understand. You either buy Server Standard 2012 - which gives you the rights to run 2 VMs on the same host. Once you start to get into larger scale setups - you buy Datacenter Licensing - which gives you effectively unlimited VMs per host - and also costs roughly $5,700 per (2 sockets) - but if you are going to have a few hosts in a highly available cluster and spin up some 15+ VMs it's worth it.

We have some envrionments with 50+ VMs across 3 host servers running VMware ESXi 5.X - which is a Type 1 hypervisor.

Type 2 Hypervisors (like VMware Workstation) require a base level OS first, whereas Type 1 Hypervisor's are "bare metal" or installed directly to the system; it IS the operating system.
 
I'll bite.

Why do you choose to run VM over a parallel or bootcamp?

I find design stuff like cad or solidworks requires all hardware on board - so that's mostly why I chose bootcamp. But I'm curious as to what each persons reasons were.
 

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