Running QlikView desktop client in a Mac virtual machine - practicality for serious development

[kevinpintokpa]

I have been running QlikView desktop client on a Mac in the following configuration:

Mac OS X 10.7

Host: 8 GM RAM

Vmware Fusion 4.1.3

Guest OS: Windows XP configured with 1 CPU and 1 GB of RAM

QlikView Desktop Client versions 10 and 11.

This works quite well and responsively for small data sets, e.g. Excel workbooks.

I am looking to buy a high end laptop with a 4-core Intel i7 CPU and 16 GB of RAM to perform serious QlikView development.  In this league, the high end MacBook Pro does not have a huge price premium, and I would get the benefits of an SSD drive and Retina display.  I would likely configure the QlikView VM with 2 cores and 8 - 12 GB of RAM.

Question:  Has anyone used this kind of configuration on a daily basis for sustained and serious development with millions of rows of data?  I'd love to hear about your experience.

[#2]

I am running QV 11 sr2 on my VMware fusion Win7 with 2 cores and 8gb of Ram assigned to VM.  It seems I cannot assign anymore than 8gb.  I am bringing in 20 million rows of records and running into very slow processing times when opening, filtering, changing views, etc...

Any help to optimize this would be greatly appreciated.

Another issue I am having is saving my files.  They seem to simply disappear completely.  Luckily I was aple to find the version copies (i use versioning (backup) to save upon reload).  but I still cannot find where my originals disappeared to.  Very frustrating but probably something simple I am doing wrong.

[kevinpintokpa]

Have you tried booting into a Boot Camp partition and running Windows + QlikView natively?  This might tell you if the performance is due to Vmware.

20 million records is quite a lot and your dashboard may well suffer performance issues if not designed around the large number.

I set up my Mac with a Boot Camp partition and configured Vmware Fusion to run Windows from the Bootcamp partition.  When using Vmware Fusion, I allocate the VM 1 core and 4 GB of RAM.  It works fine for me for most cases.

If I have to work with very large data sets, I boot into Windows directly, at which point, QlikView can access 4 cores and 16 GB of RAM.

[#4]

THank you. When you say "I boot into Windows directly" are you referring to BootCamp?

To use BootCamp and VMware fusion, I would need to purchase another license for Win7 for bootcamp, correct?

[#5]

I wont be developing apps to run on desktop for 20 million record application fortunately.  Just at data discovery mode now and do not yet have access to a server that I can work on remotely.  Once we get teh server set up, I will be remoting into the server to do these large testing applications.

[kevinpintokpa]

Yes, I meant boot into the Boot Camp partition.  However, you may not need to purchase another Win7 license.  I was able to activate the same Win7 under both Bootcamp and Vmware.