I finally took possession of my new Mac Pro this week. Lovin’ it so far. So why the delay?
I’ve been using Parallels since I got my MacBook Pro last summer with a Win2k image I built myself. With the sudden proliferation of Intel Macs around the office, the last thing I wanted to do was to get into the business of building and maintaining VMs for everyone.
When I ordered my new system back in December, I made a deal with our IT group. They hadn’t yet gotten their hands on an Intel Mac of their own — they’d only processed the dozen or so that others had bought. So no time to play with Parallels…
So I offered to let them hold onto the machine for a while to build a standardized VM image (or images) for distribution with new Intel Macs as needed. They took me up on the offer, and everything was peachy.
With the start of the new semester, support queues dragged out, and what was admittedly a low-priority task got put off. The crew finally got back to my system last week.
Well, building a “stock” image is easier said than done. The more we talked about requirements for the image, the more we realized that the audience here is fairly diverse. Certainly, not everyone is going to need a SQL Server instance! So we agreed to revisit the whole VM issue in a couple weeks, but in the mean time I’d get my new system.