Over the last few months I’ve been using VMWare Fusion on my MacBook Pro to run a few VM’s to experiment with beta builds of operating systems and to try out software without worrying about wrecking my MacBook Pro. VMWare Fusion is pretty neat in that it allows me a license in order to create and play virtual machines but I can’t do advanced stuff like cloning them which really isn’t a concern of mine given what I’m doing with them.
I created 3 different VM’s, 2 of them were just to mess with beta operating systems and one was to run Windows 10. I don’t have a lot of reasons to run actual programs on my MacBook Pro except for things that are Mac exclusives, however there are some things that just require Windows so thats why I have the Windows 10 VM. I also decided to create another Windows 10 VM and joined the Windows Insider Program so that I could take Windows 11 for a test drive. I still have the Windows 11 machine running and after my evaluation I don’t want to upgrade any of my other computers at home to Windows 11 unless I’m forced to. I also can’t use most of the new features like Teams since no one except work friends are on it and I don’t want to talk shop on my off hours. Most of the changes have been really aesthetic for the most part. Windows 10 should be fine for a long time, or at least another 5 years in whichI would upgrade my computers again so they are running Mac OS or something and having them run VM’s.
The final VM was for MacOS Monterey which is the beta for my Mac. I haven’t seen anything that is really compelling about the OS right now. But that might be due to it being in a VM. I will say this though, the Windows VM’s work much faster than the Mac ones. The MacOS VM seems to have a delay when launching applications of any kind but I was able to use it with my work profile for the most part for things like iMessage and WhatsApp but for MS Office, it was a no go unfortunately. The OS itself looks pretty familiar overall so there aren’t any surprises but I’m glad that I can run it in isolation.
One of the great security measures I’ve heard of is to use VM’s to isolate browsing and other online activity to protect the host machine. Now my host machine is really the only personal computer I have that is semi modern given that its 4 years old. I have been using my VM’s to test out software that I’m not willing to put on my regular computer. This is mainly to keep my main computer as clean as possible and to avoid any complications for when I finally upgrade to another Mac. Now I use the VM’s almost every day for surfing the web and doing research while just using my host machine for trusted websites and apps. This is not the first time I’ve used VM’s, I have them on my NAS but when they run natively on my computer they run a whole lot faster. It’s probably becauseI have more cores and RAM to give to the VM’s and it doesn’t have to stream through a network connection.
The downside with the VM’s is that I generally don’t log into them with my credentials for any services that I use. Also, since these VM’s reside on my laptop I can’t access them from everywhere like I could from Azure or AWS. I’ve done the cost comparisons for those services and it could cost about as much as a computer when all is said and done which is why I haven’t bothered doing it that way. I mean it would make life easier if I was nomadic and I used my VM’s but its only for surfing purposes and it seems rather expensive to spin up VM’s to do minor things that can mostly be done on an iPad if it really came down to it. Last downside is the amount of space required to keep that many VM’s on my laptop. They take up about 60GB’s of space per VM. I’m lucky that my MacBook Pro has 1TB of storage so I can still have some space for my data. I like VMWare Fusion, I think its really helpful overall and for the security minded and tech savvy, a good way to stay protected online while trying out new things.
Wonger's Ramblings 