The traditional model for deploying software applications has been to use one or more stand-alone computer systems, each of which runs a single operating system. As the power and capacity of individual hardware components – processing cores, network interfaces, and mass storage peripherals – has increased, the actual utilization of these hardware components has, in many cases, decreased. An immediate result of this combination is the desire to consolidate more than one software application or workload on the physical server. This practice is generally referred to as hardware consolidation. To address this desire for efficiency, manufacturers began providing a broad spectrum of hardware partitioning and sharing technologies.

Grouping hardware components of a physical computing configuration into subsystems or partitions is one approach to hardware consolidation. Because these partitions contain entire hardware components, they provide dedicated access to those components.

Providing a means of sharing hardware components within a physical server or partition can be performed in many different ways as outlined below:

Hard Partitions – nPars
With electrical separation, hard partitions are isolated in hardware from each other, so hardware failures are confined to the partition in which they occur. Applications and operating environments execute in hard partitions that function as if they were separate physical servers. Moreover, the majority of hardware upgrades will require that only the affected hard partitions be brought down, not the entire system. The reconfiguration or rebooting of an individual hard partition does not require a reboot of the entire system. Hard partitions support multiple operating systems, including HP-UX 11i, Windows Server 2003®, and Linux®.

Virtual Partitions – vPars
Created by software, each virtual partition runs its own operating-system image and can host its own applications, offering complete software isolation. Many virtual partitions can run within a hard partition or on the same physical server. Since processing cores allocated to a virtual partition can be allocated dynamically without requiring the partition to be rebooted, they offer tremendous flexibility. Processing cores may be “moved” from one virtual partition to another dynamically, allowing for load rebalancing to address changing data processing requirements.

Virtual Machines
One important approach to hardware sharing is that of providing a layer between the physical hardware and the operating system(s) which virtualizes the hardware components. In doing so, a single hardware component may be associated with multiple virtual hardware components. These virtual hardware components may then be grouped together into a virtual computer system, or virtual machine.

The virtual machine solved a problem: How to take advantage of hardware, as well as software needs, under the hood of the same box. By its very definition, “an efficient, isolated duplicate of a real machine.” Great idea to resolve an age old problem with AutoCAD – how to run one version in DOS, and another in windows, to take advantage of as many resources and functions as were were able to within the confines of a single box. Just like we did with AutoCAD 12 for DOS and 13 for Windows. Release 13 had issues until patch c4 was issued. And until that time, many of us booted to DOS for production work, back to Windows for other “stuff.” But make no mistake, virtualization is solving the same problem (technically “partitioning”) for a dual “boot,” albiet a virtual dual boot – simply in a different era.

Thanks Anonymous (I’ll never understand why those intending to be heard hide behind “John Doe, we may like to ask more of your opinions).

Civil 3D will only run in a Windows Environment. With the release of several surveys in the past year, it is clear Autodesk is interested in moving more design packages to the Mac. More development staff, more AE staff, more high end users are interested in making a move to the Mac and running AutoCAD Civil 3D in a virtual environment. And while Autodesk has said it supports Parallels, it’s performance is far from smooth, and even farther from robust when running AutoCAD Civil 3D – again, the target of the post.

I stand by my initial findings. Parallels is not robust enough to run AutoCAD Civil 3D in a production environment. Fusion is. Not only is this sound advice, it is likely the only advice you’ll find comparing the strength of Running AutoCAD Civil 3D in Fusion vs. Parallels on Snow Leopard.

While this flexibility may seem to have some resemblance to you, as rebooting from another partition; this is certainly not the nature nor the origins Virtualizing one hardware and software platform in order to run on another. Perhaps you were thinking of roots related to “emulation”, but certainly not “partitioning”. This is like saying “abstraction layers have their roots in defragmentation.” – huh?

A much smarter corse of action would be to follow a solid, best practice, set of workflow procedure; and certainly eliminate any tendency to activate useless “Coherence” modes / features, or worry with “multitouch” or touchpad gestures, which have little to do with the PC application being utilized within the guest OS. His criticism are a distraction from effective real-world test and any useful results for those wishing to exploit the power of OpenGL and DirectX application in question by your readers.

Anyone actually depending on Virtualized environments for the purpose of 3D Content Creation, Visualization or Simulation, will certainly benefit from using OS-X, and the Parallels solution for a multitude of stability and performance related issues which this reviewer is failing to even come close to consider, test or address. I would not want to be in a position of siding with him, nor advising people to blindly switch or re-consider a choice of VM Ware product line for these particular use cases.

Incidentally, I also suggest utilizing some appropriate graphics hardware with a Multi-Proc Xeon, Mac Pro which can fully take advantage of both the Host OS and the Guest OS APIs and GLs; such as the Nvidia GTX-285.

Somewhere on the FEMA site there is a file to allow you to see the FEMA data in Google Earth. I downloaded the kmz and it works great. The kmz is named FEMA_NFHL_v2.3.kmz.

I can send it to you via email if you would like.

We use it all the time.

Thanks,

Conan

Femi Pearse