Anybody had any luck with Rockwell and VMWare? In order to combat the system drain when loading Rockwell bloatware, I decided to use VMWare. Silly me, I forgot to read Rockwell's small print. Consequently I wound up with x64 running and a whole load of probs. VMWare looks good and Linx seems ok, but studio and the rest of the family look iffy. I wondered how much of that was 64 bit and how much was VMWare. Anybody any experience with either?

 

RSLogix, all the versions we've tried, run pretty well inside a 32 bit virtual machine on a 32 bit host, so long as you are communicating over Ethernet. We haven't tried a 32 bit VM inside a 64 bit host. There seems to be no difference whether you use WinXP or Linux as the host OS.

What absolutely doesn't work is anything that needs to talk directly to DH+ hardware. You can't get a PKTX or PCMK card working inside the VM. The VMWare virtualization techniques are not aimed at spoofing the host's actual physical hardware bus.

So far we've never fooled around with any of the other Rockwell stuff in a VM besides one horrid job where we loaded up 6200 on a DOS VM so we could look at an old program to see just what in blue blazes it was supposed to have done originally. But we never used that setup to connect to the PLC, just as a way to browse the original documentation.

MB
--
Michael R. Batchelor
www.ind-info.com

 

I am running it all inside an XP box on my Vista Laptop. Had a couple of small self induced issues but it has been working great.

A lot of the Rockwell training sessions (dog and pony) shows lately have been on VMW so it works.

Using RSLogix 5000, RSLogix 5, Emulators, RSView 32, RSLinx, Panelbuilder, and some others.

Dave

 

I have been using VMWare with Rockwell products for the past 7 years with little or no issues. What I would recommend is using a standard version of XP as the virtual machine. Windows 2000 is another option.

ckinze @ chapusa. com

 

Have a look at this post (Step 7 Install Hangs 22 December, 2006 - 12:31 am). http://www.control.com/thread/1026218804#1026229745

The post started as a question on Step-7, but one person said he had success using VMWare with RSLogix.

I haven't used this combination, but I have a few suggestions that might help. You said you "wound up with x64 running". Is that MS-WIndows XP x64 as the guest OS you are trying to use? If so, that might be part of your problem. There is little to no native 64 bit application software for MS-Windows, and running 32 bit software on 64 bit MS-Windows is hit and miss as to whether it works properly. In fact almost nobody except for a few hobbyists use 64 bit versions of MS-Windows (few people even know that it exists). There's no drivers and application compatibility is poor. Lots of people are using 64 bit mode on x86-64, but virtually all of them are using Linux, BSD, or Solaris where these sorts of problems were solved years ago.

There can sometimes be additional problems with VMWare running a 64 bit guest depending upon the particular CPU model (even including the particular revision) in your PC. A 32 bit guest on a 32 bit host should be fine. A 32 bit guest on a 64 bit host should be fine provided the 32 bit guest installs correctly.

There are also lots of little "tweaks" that sometimes need to be made to VMWare that can't be made through the normal set-up software, but have to be done by editing the configuration files. These can include access to various peripherals (particularly USB).

Finally, make sure you have *lots* of RAM (at least 1 Gig), and make sure you give the guest VM enough RAM.

 

Last year at RSTeched, all the workshop PCs used VMWare with a variety of Rockwell Software configurations, and I did hear of any crashes/errors.

 

I meant that I hadn't heard of any crashes....