New Laptop cont…

Well, after prompting from Dallas Marks and another viewier that I needed to post another update, I thought I’d let everyone know where I’m up to.  I’ve now had the laptop for several months, and am absolutely loving it – as those who follow me on Twitter will have seen.  I thought I would be booting into Windows Server 2008 most of the time while at work, but I’ve found I can’t live without some of my OSX apps, including MindNode and Nambu.

However, I have changed the operating systems a few times, and now settled on pure OSX, with the following VMs running in VMWare Fusion:

  • Desktop – Windows 7 64bit for MS Office (especially Outlook) and BusinessObjects desktop tools
  • Server – Windows Server 2008 R2 for SQL Server 2008, Oracle 11g XE, BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1 and Data Services XI 3.2
  • BI4 – Windows Server 2008 R2 for SAP BusinessObjects BI4 beta

The thing I’m regretting is moving up to a 15″ MBP.  I really miss the form factor of my 13″ Macbook, and now with 13″ MBPs, I can get the same performance from a 13″ that I can from my 15″.  When I upgrade in a few years, I’m definitely going back to 13″.

The performance is excellent.  I run my Server VM with 4GB RAM assigned, and it hums along.  I’ve got the services that start on boot optimised, so now I only start SQL Server (but not SSAS), the SIA (with only the CMS, File Input and File Output servers) and Tomcat.  Boot up time is only a minute or two, and then I use batch scripts to start up various BusinessObjects servers as required for demos.

Data Services also performs extremely well.  I benchmarked performance of a CSV file with 64,000 rows being pivoted in memory to a couple of million rows, and run time of the job was less than a minute.

For those that seek performance and the usability of OSX, I definitely recommend a MBP with VMWare Fusion.

- Josh

This entry was posted on Monday, January 31st, 2011 at 4:28 PMand is filed under Business Intelligence, Virtualisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “New Laptop cont…”

  • Joshua Fletcher Says:
    February 28th, 2011 at 11:04 AM

    I’m probably going to hang onto my 15″ for a little while, it’s still pretty new! :) don’t forget you can go thru a Mac reseller and normally get bigger (and faster) HDDs then what Apple offer on the site – you’ll be able to get a 7200rpm drive for the 13″ easily.

    Cheers,

    Josh

  • Dallas Marks Says:
    February 25th, 2011 at 4:09 AM

    Are you going to get one of the new MacBooks announced today? I’d prefer a 13″ for the size but only the 15″ and 17″ come with optional 7200 RPM drives. Which would you choose?

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