Z840 as a replacement for iMac and Mac Pro

[vrBrew]

I just bought a Z840 with dual E5-2690s, 128GB of memory, and dual 1080 video cards. I also set it up with 3 three raid sets. I have 4x 256GB in raid 0, with 2x 480GB in raid 0, and 4x 4TB in raid 10.

I run vmware workstation with sierra running as a VM so I can run my legacy apple apps.

I have run apple since the IIGS. Over the last couple of years apple pulled support for aperture and made low quality choices in hardware and poor upgrades to their line of video editing apps. It seems that they are forcing me out of my choices for photo and video editing.

 

[m4v3r1ck]

I do hope my cMP 3.1 + 5.1 both will hang on to me for a few years more, but having said that I'm closely following al the new and very exciting developments for the other OS on my hybrid - macOS and Windows - Mac Pro as well!

And yes, have been looking at the HP Z840 as well. It's a great alternative for the cMP!

AFAIK: running macOS Sierra in a VM is in conflict with Apple's UELA. But that's for to the more legal enthousiasts her on MR!

Enjoy your new WORKstation!

Cheers

 

[fhall1]

How much RAM do you allocate to the Sierra VM? Does the main host OS reside on an SSD or spinning HDD? How well does the VM run?

 

[vrBrew]

How much RAM do you allocate to the Sierra VM? Does the main host OS reside on an SSD or spinning HDD? How well does the VM run?

I have 16 GB allocated to Sierra with 8 cores The VM boot disk is on 4x SSD raid 0. The host also boots from that raid set. The VM scores ~1300 with blackmagic disk speed test app.

The host is windows 10 and also boots off the the raid 0.

I mostly use the system to run Cisco VIRL and GNS3. I also do amateur video editing with my

 

[fhall1]

Does Sierra load pretty easily with VMware Workstation on a Win10 host or is there a lot of futzing around to get it to boot/run (like a hackintosh)? I've never tried to run MacOS on a Windows host - always the other way around.

 

[vrBrew]

I used instructions from http://www.insanelymac.com/

It took me about 2 hours to get a working copy of El Capitan running and then Sierra was an upgrade through the app store.