Dedicated machine vs vm on osx

is it reasonable to do windows development in vmware/parallels on a relatively recent mac? if not, what’s the bare minimum windows machine required for windows development?

I do all my main work on a Mac and use Parallels for the Windows build. It’s worked very well. When running my plugin/app on the vm, it’s a little laggy, but everything works. My Windows beta testers have rarely found something that wasn’t apparent in my vm.

development yes. But performance and latency of realtime audio & graphics performance will be a bit different on a VM, so to get the real windows experience™ and know what your customers are getting i would recommend having a windows machine too if you can afford it

Using Bootcamp is always an option if you need better performance. Avoids most of the pitfalls of using a VM

I ditched my Windows machine for bootcamp simply because most of the time I find it perfectly convenient enough. At times it’s annoying restarting to switch, previously I used Microsoft Remote Desktop to access my Windows machine, which is great! but I was glad to get rid of the bulky loud machine under my desk.

I have a VirtualBox for builds.
It can be helpful for headless one command building. however those days I use RDM on another machine (laptop).

Another issue I’m seeing is with File Systems. I’ve tried having single file system (ExFAT). but Xcode can do some nasty things when your files are on ExFAT. especially Xcode compilation intermediate files gets xcodebuild to stuck sometimes. (it was useful to try on multiple platforms before committing…)

BootCamp works fine for building and testing, and is a one machine solution.

Actually, for over a year, I ran OSX Sierra in a VM in Windows 10 (VMWare). That is an option also if you are more on the Windows development side (as I am). I can even run Pro Tools in that VM! So, it is another one-machine option.

Happy bootcamp user here. The performance in bootcamp is definitely smoother and snappier than a VM. Using a third disk partition or an external USB SSD disk as shared data source so that I don’t have to maintain multiple copies of code on the mac and Windows side.

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