Anyone Use VMs to run Maple - or Use VMs at all?

[EJC]

I do a lot of modeling in Maple. I recently bought a Macbook, and may run Windows through a VM and use Maple inside that until the eventual day that I buy a license for Maple for my Mac. Anyone have any insight on this? I've looked into dual booting and VMs, and since Maple (and occasionally MATLAB) is basically all I'll be using on Windows, I think I'm going to use a VM. I know the competition is between Parallels, VM Fusion, and Virtualbox (free), and I'd like to use Virtualbox since it's free, but only if it will be able to handle some complex modeling/computation in Maple.

 

[jim mcnamara]

IF I understand your question: VM does not care what you run as long as it does not invoke system code for another type of computer OS than the guest OS. MacBook Pro is Darwin on x86 I believe so you are okay there - cpu instruction set wise.

You get less resources: memory, and OS system objects that consume memory as a guest than you would running native. So in your case you are running MAple for Windows on a guest OS: windows. Should run just fine. If your code runs a like a dog natively it will run even slower on the virtual. Generally.

 

[cosmik debris]

I run a Mac with a Linux, Windows 7, and Windows 10 VM. They run things like Maple fine and are more convenient than dual booting. Lots of memory helps.

 

[pilofrogs]

Dual booting and in not using a VM would probably be better than using a VM for any computationally intensive work. VMs never run as fast as bare metal. While VMs can share CPU, they can't share memory, so Cosmic Debris is right on about memory being helpful. If you don't care that much about tip-top performance, a VM can be a lot more convenient since you don't have to reboot every time you want to do stuff in your Mac. Anything that runs on regular hardware should run on a VM. That's what they're for. They just bring some overhead that affects performance.