Imac 2012 Software Compatibility

[Astryd Boschee]

Formy personal use, home computing, I want to go for Apple iMac, but, only doubt factor stopping me is the compatibility of Microsoft products on Apple machines. Basically, I want to have a full home use installations of Microsoft products such as SQL Server Management Studio, Business Intelligence products (SSIS, SSAS, SSRS), Visual Studio, Access Database, SQL Server Database and MS-Office.

General googling gave me confidence that we have Apple Mac compatible Microsoft products, however, am bit hesitant to move away from IBM "PC" concept to Apple Mac for concern of incompatibility issues with Microsoft Development tools such as SSDT and others mentioned above.

You cannot install Microsoft SQL Server software in a Mac OS but you can run Windows in a VM on a Mac OS and install your software inside the Windows installation in the VM. Look into the software "Parallels" for Mac.

As Orlando pointed out, your two common ways of doing it is to run a VM using Parallels or VMWare, or using Bootcamp to effectively dual-boot your computer in to a Windows environment. (I think there are one or two other VM packages out there, but I have no experience with them: Parallels and VMWare are the biggies) Personally I use Parallels currently though I'm contemplating a switch to VMWare. I don't think you can convert virtual machine images between those two, so I'll be doing a full rebuild.

I would give VMWare a slight preference as you can swap images between your laptop and your employer's infrastructure, assuming they're running a VMWare environment and policy (and disk space!) allow.

A couple of 'gotchas' with Parallels. Apple releases a new OS-X every year, and every year Parallels will hound you to buy a new upgrade. Also, they'll hound you whenever a new version of Windows comes out. As the upgrade is typically $50, it's no big deal, but it's annoying. They seem to revel in making their system incompatible with the next OS. Also, whenever they upgrade their 'Parallels Tools', it will upgrade your VM (each and every VM that you have), which will require a VM reboot. It can take a while, so personally I would upgrade the tools for the first couple of months when a new edition of the software came out, then ignore it if I didn't have a lot of time available.

Functionally, it works just fine. I'd recommend a Mac with 8-16 gig of memory, and with iMacs and Mac Pros supporting 32 gig or more, that's what I'd do. By using a VM system, you have the option of flipping between the two operating systems. The VM software is quite mature as they've been improving it for years ever since Apple went Intel and OS-X.

One thing to watch out for: Time Machine backups. If you're running TM, and you should!, I would do two things. First, exclude your VM from the TM backup. My VMs are typically around 80 gig: while that isn't much, every time you open that VM it is marked as updated and the system will want to back it up, which may or may not be what you want. I'd suggest copying the VM to wherever your backup is whenever you change your backup media.

You may also have keyboard mapping issues. The Windows keyboard functionality is there, but sometimes it's hidden behind somewhat arcane keyboard combinations or menus. But it's there. The absence of a Delete key from the stock Apple keyboards has always been a source of vexation for me.

I say go for it. I've been doing it for 8(?!) years now, I find it hard to believe it's been that long. I went to SQL PASS in 2008 and was very happy to see several people using MacBook Pros to run SQL Server on. I've seen even more (as a percentage of attendees) at the two SQL Saturday events that I've attended.

2nd EDIT: Obviously you'll need a licensed Windows OS: 7, 8, 10, Server, whatever ($100+). I'm using 7 Pro. And you can buy SQL Server Developer Edition from Amazon and other places for $55 or so which gives you all of the features of the Enterprise edition except it's not usable for a production installation. As long as you own the CDs from a Windows installation, including your Office package, you should be good to go.

If you have the Micrsoft developer stack installed on your PC at work, and you're essentially wanting to experiment and learn from comfort of home after hours, then consider using VPN client to remote into your work PC. That's the easiest and least expensive option.

Assuming you want to go the route of installing and running a VM on your Mac, keep in mind it would consume about 20 GB (at least) of HD space and require at least 8 GB of RAM to be usable. If your Mac isn't up to spec for that type of multitasking, then you may be better off to purchase a low end PC laptop just for this dedicated purpose rather than cluttering up your Mac. You can spend $300 on a low-end PC laptop with QuadCore CPU, 4 GB of RAM and 500 GB HD storage, which is a cheap and capable work horse, and much less expensive than upgrading your Mac.

One thing to consider if you're going to run SQL Server locally is memory. SQL Server loves memory. Whatever you give it, it will happily use and just want 1 more GB. If you give it another 16 GB, it'll happily use it and just want 1 more GB. I agree with Eric's suggestion of running it on it's own Windows laptop, but giving it memory to work with will reduce (not eliminate) your frustration factor.

Balancing SQL Server needs is definitely an issue with OS virtualization, then again, that's true with any virtualization setup. You've got the base machine's RAM, then in the VM manager you configure how much memory the individual VM will have, then you configure SQL Server. My last experiences with Parallels on a 16 gig iMac would let you take the VM to 16 gig available, but I don't recall it letting you virtualize more RAM.

I am a Linux user at home (MS Environment at work), I use Crossover (by Codeweavers) to run windows programs and it works really well. They make a version for Mac as well and have a trial version which fully works but has a limited period of x amount of days, so worth a testing as you wont need a Windows VM to use it.

However, your question has inspired me to give it a go, so within the next couple of weeks I'll be installing Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 in a VM with 24GB RAM; the iMac has 32GB installed.

I've also added in some bug fixes, mainly that it wasn't matching the full line if the last number after the comma in the model identifier was a double digit (as Apple added one this year for the first time), and gave myself some wiggle room in all the other models in case Apple continues to add more double digit identifiers down the line:

As done previously, you can create a smart group using this in order to find devices in your environment that are not compatible to be upgraded to macOS Sonoma by using the criteria item Model Identifier and then selecting "does not match regex" operator. Copy/paste the regex into the value and save the Smart Group to view all mac's that ARE NOT compatible with Sonoma, or set the operator to "matches regex" to see devices that ARE compatible.

It's a good idea to add compatibility for Virtual Machines if there's likely to be any in your environment. Apple Silicon VMs have their own identifier, so you have to add that.

Here's our compatibility regex for Sonoma:

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Hello, I just purchased a new iMac - late 2013 27". I am interested in a usb hub for it for ease of connecting things instead of on the back. I see many issues with these hubs but they seem to be dated quite a wile ago. How is the compatibility now?

Thanks, I was aware about the superdrive. How about using a 2.0 hub? All I want to be able to do is connect my camera (which is 2.0) to download pictures and a flash drive to copy things to load things.

In short, you can probably get most devices to work fine on the USB 3.0 hub itself, but in case of issues you can have a 2nd USB 2.0 hub connected to the 3.0 one and use that to work around any issues you hit with the 3.0 one.

macOS, originally Mac OS X, previously shortened as OS X, is an operating system developed and marketed by Apple since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and laptop computers, it is the second most widely used desktop OS, after Microsoft Windows and ahead of all Linux distributions, including ChromeOS.

Mac OS X succeeded classic Mac OS, the primary Macintosh operating system from 1984 to 2001. Its underlying architecture came from NeXT's NeXTSTEP, as a result of Apple's acquisition of NeXT, which also brought Steve Jobs back to Apple.

The first desktop version, Mac OS X 10.0, was released on March 24, 2001. All releases from Mac OS X Leopard onward (except for OS X Lion) are UNIX 03 certified.[8][9] The derivatives of macOS are Apple's other operating systems: iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and audioOS.

A prominent part of macOS's original brand identity was the use of Roman numeral X, pronounced "ten", as well as code naming each release after species of big cats, and later, places within California.[10] Apple shortened the name to "OS X" in 2011 and then changed it to "macOS" in 2016 to align with the branding of Apple's other operating systems, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS.[11] After sixteen distinct versions of macOS 10, macOS Big Sur was presented as version 11 in 2020, and every subsequent version has also incremented the major version number, similarly to classic Mac OS and iOS.

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