Data Acquisition (DAQ) and Control from Microstar Laboratories

Knowledge Base: Platform

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Q10011 Can I run DAPL systems under Virtual Machine software?

Tags: Help, DAP, DAPL, installation, operating system, virtual system, Mac, Linux

Applies to: All DAP and DAPL versions

Is it possible to run DAP software in a virtual machine environment? I would really like to run it on my Mac system, but you provide only Windows system software.

We don't know. Why don't you try it, and we'll let everyone know about it here.

There are some technical difficulties to watch out for:

  1. Capacity. Microstar takes the USB ports on Windows machines to the limits of what they can do. Given that the performance is already restricted by the operating system, a VM layer will only make matters worse. The xDAP, running on its own hardware in the embedded DAP system, will still be measuring and processing at 100% of course, so it would only be the host-side capacity that is restricted. If you are collecting just a few hundred megabytes of data and then shutting down the measurement process to analyze data later, or if you are pre-processing your data on the DAP rather than transferring in bulk, transfer rate limitations might not matter. But continuous processes could choke on a backlog of buffered data and halt prematurely.

  2. Processor. Most of the VM packages make the machine look like bare hardware to the virtual environment... but this does not make the bare hardware look like a different kind of processor. If your Mac OS X system runs on PowerPC hardware, DAP software will not run there. If you run OS X for Intel on x86 hardware, you won't have a true Mac machine, but much better odds that it is compatible.

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