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Rooks103 avatar image
Rooks103 asked Erick Ramirez edited

Tips for running VirtualBox on a MacBook Pro?

This probably falls a little outside the scope of DS Community, but given the courses all center around VirtualBox (for the most part), I felt it appropriate to at least ask. I'm just curious if folks have good suggestions for running the courses on a MacBook Pro.

I struggled to get the VM to run at any sort of usable speed for DS201 until I switched on the "Open in Low Resolution" flag for the VirtualBoxVM.app, and put my laptop in clamshell mode (i.e. laptop closed with only an external monitor. Most reports said this was around the retina display not playing nice with VirtualBox. However, now for DS210, even with that setup, I once again am struggling to get this usable. About 50% of the time, I'm seeing the VM lock up after the boot sequence (similar to this issue, but I've confirmed 3D Acceleration is disabled on my VM), and the other times, when the OS does load, it is very slow to the point where it's not registering double clicks, won't allow me to move or resize windows, etc. I've tried increasing the memory and processor available to the VM with no luck. Video memory is already maxed at 128MB. Tried switching between Scaled and Fullscreen mode. Even tried enabling 3D acceleration with no luck.

I'm just curious if folks have had better luck than I have or have found a few tricks to getting to this work in a reasonable fashion. I'll keep tinkering to see if I can find any solutions, but felt like it was worth asking the question.

OS is Big Sur 11.6 and VirtualBox version is 6.1.28 for visibility.

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Erick Ramirez answered Erick Ramirez edited

Interesting scenario you're running into. I'm on a 2020 MacBook Pro (not M1) but haven't experienced the issues you've described.

I'm a late adopter of new operating system versions mostly because I'm pretty much responding to questions 16-hours a day, 7 days a week and can't afford the downtime or stress of running into weird issues so I'm still running with macOS Catalina.

For what it's worth, we haven't updated the courses at the DataStax Academy because we're migrating to platforms which allow users to learn hands-on with the least amount of effort. You'll see examples of our tutorials on datastax.com/dev although the use case for the admin course is a little bit different.

Hopefully, someone else from the community can help you with your problem. Cheers!

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Rooks103 avatar image Rooks103 commented ·

@Erick Ramirez Thanks for the reply, Erick. I think I'll be able to use my wife's Windows laptop as a work around for now, but was just curious if anyone else had seen anything like this since I know MBP's are a very popular development platform. We'll see if anyone else has any recommendations.

Also, I'd recommend answering fewer questions. Take a break, sir. You deserve it. :-)

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