Thought Fusion Mac OS
Parallels Mac
Fusion Mac Windows
Thought Fusion Mac Os Catalina
Ive written before about bootstrapping my development virtual infrastructure. When I did that I used an existing bare image VM I had lying around, but with CentOS 6 around the corner I wanted to document a process for creating a bare image from scratch.
First, you need CentOS 5.6 ISOs, so download CentOS if needed.
If youre using a version of OS X older than Yosemite, when typing the address on your Mac youll need to type smb:// first in the Connect to Server dialog box for example, smb://192.168.1.2. I thought APFS doesn't support Fusion Drive yet. More Less iMac with Retina 5K display, macOS High Sierra (10.13), 27, 2017.
We need to create a floppy drive with a FAT or EXT2 filesystem, with a ks.cfg file on it. On the mac this seems trickier than it should be. If you have an existing linux VM you can use that. If not, make a new default VM, then
attach the CentOS 5.6 part1 DVD iso as the DVD drive.
Run installer. Settings do not matter. Disable packages to make install go quickly.
shut down VM.
echo ' ' floppy144.flp , add floppy drive with that file.
start VM.
Lets make our floppy and put a kickstart file on it:
Note among other things the above settings disable the iptables firewall and disable selinux and use a plaintext password changeme12 . You should understand what that means and be happy with the security implications before you continue.
Shut down the VM, or at least unmount the floppy. If you made that VM just to create the floppy file, you can now throw that VM away. If youre writing your own kickstart file you may want to keep it around though in case you made a mistake, so you can go back easily and edit the file on the floppy.
Now were ready to start work on our image:
create new empty VM called vanilla-sandbox .
Resize the disk image to 10GB.
set RAM to 256MB.
disable just about all options including audio support, usb support, printer support, file sharing, etc.
set to NAT networking.
attach CentOS part1 DVD to cdrom drive.
attach floppy144.flp as a new floppy drive.
Start the VM.
At the prompt, type linux ks=floppy .
Wait until prompted, then press enter to reboot.
log in as root.
run yum -y update .
run find /var/cache -type f xargs rm -f .
shutdown -h now .
open the settings pane, open the hard disk panel, and select clean up disk.
disconnect and remove the floppy drive. Disconnect the DVD drive.
(optional), open the directory containing the VM location in the terminal and mv *.vmwarevm/* . rm -r *.vmwarevm . When you next open the VM (you will need to use File Open), select I moved it.
Make a backup copy of the virtual machine files, this is your clean VMWare-independent base VM.
Start the virtual machine.
in the Fusion menu, select Virtual Machine Install VMWare tools, and install the tools:
In the Fusion menu, select Virtual Machine CD/DVD Disconnect CD/DVD
Shut down the virtual machine
Make a backup copy of the virtual machine files, this is your clean VMWare-ready base VM.
So now you have one squeaky clean VM image and a documented process for recreating it. Of course, most of this process isnt particularly specific to CentOS, or VMWare, or Mac OS X. If you use different install media, these instructions work without changes for various versions of Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. According to this official ubuntu help page the same basic approach may work for recent Ubuntu releases (though replacing yum with apt-get ).
I seem to remember that on linux theres various more convenient ways to do this stuff. For example, you can install into a loopback device. But for now, this will do.
A Fusion Drive gives you the best of two worlds: the high storage capacity of a traditional platter-based hard drive, and the speed boost of a solid-state drive, without you having to manually manage files. Apple offers the Fusion Drive as build-to-order options for the $799 Mac mini and the upcoming iMac, but if you are willing, able, and have the parts, you can make your own Fusion Drive.
To build a Fusion Drive, you need to use the Terminal. Were going to lay out the commands you need in a way that most can understand, and you dont need to enter a lot of them. However, a warning to anyone who has never used the Terminal: Working with the Terminal isnt as simple as a graphic interface, as spelling counts and you dont always have a nice list of commands. You also need to be using OS X 10.8.2 or later. Gather your drives
You need two drives to make a Fusion Drive, and if you want to get the speed boost, one should be an SSD. In our setup, we used a Hitachi 1TB 2.5-inch hard drive (the one that ships in a Mac mini) and a 240GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD. Capsule fight! mac os. Clumsy fred mac os .
Apple chooses the drives they use based on extensive testing, which is why they recommend buying a Fusion Drive at the point of purchasing your Mac. Apple does not support users who have built their own Fusion Drive. (In our lab experiments, I was able to create a Fusion Drive with two flash thumb drives.) Back up your data
If you have anything that you want to keep on either of the drives, now is the time to back it up: linking the drives with CoreStorage, the technology behind the Fusion Drive, will erase them completely. If you need help with backing up your data, check out our guide on how to back up your data with Time Machine or, if you dont need to save absolutely everything on your drive, our more generic guide on backing up your data. Bust open Terminal
The Disk Utility application (Application Utilities Disk Utility) doesnt support the management or creation of Fusion Drives in its graphical interface, and knowing Apple, it might not ever support it. To create the Fusion Drive, well use Disk Utility, but the command line version that comes with every Mac. (Learn more about the Disk Utility command line.)
If you arent going to include the drive you booted from in a Fusion Drive, you can open the Terminal app (Applications Utilities Terminal). This would be the case, say, if youre using a Mac Pro with multiple drive bays, since you can format them both externally.
If you want to include your current boot drive as part of the Fusion Drive, youre going to need to boot into recovery mode and run Terminal from there. The CoreStorage process used to fuse the drives also formats them, and you cant do that to a drive used as the boot drive. You can boot into recovery mode by holding Command+R when starting up your Mac, and open Terminal from there.
One last thing to note: If youre using a Mac currently in Apples product line, such as the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro or the new Mac mini, you cant use just any old install disc as a boot disc. Those machines require a special version of Mountain Lion thats not yet in the App Store. So in this circumstance, recovery mode is your best bet. Make the drive
Once you have the Terminal open, youre ready to get to creating the Fusion Drive.
List the drives you system can see. Use the following command to list the drives attached to your system:
diskutil list
This will list the drives like this:
The drive mount points are labeled /dev/disk . Make a note of the mount points for the disks you want to make into a Fusion Drive. In our example, /dev/disk0 is the boot disk, while /dev/disk1 and /dev/disk2 are the SSD and hard drive (respectively) that we want to put together as a Fusion Drive. An easy way to tell drives apart is by their size and their name. Make sure you dont confuse them, as the Terminal doesnt give much warning before wiping your drive. Parallels Mac
Create a logical volume group. Lets create a CoreStorage logical volume group, the pool of data that will be made from the combined space of our physical drives. Megaparsec mac os . Use the following format of the diskutil command:
diskutil coreStorage create nameYourThing drive1 drive2
Going off the example using /dev/disk1 and /dev/disk2 as the drives to combine, I simply type:
diskutil coreStorage create myLogicalVolGroup /dev/disk1 /dev/disk2
When the process is done, your logical volume group should be completed and the command will finish by presenting you with a unique identifier for the group, which you should copy to your clipboard. It should look similar to this:
Create a logical volume. Now that we have a logical volume group, we can create the logical volume, what your Mac will recognize as a single drive. Use the following format of the diskutil command: Fusion Mac Windows
diskutil coreStorage createVolume lvgUUID type name size
lvgUUID is the unique identifier you copied from the previous step.
type use Journaled HFS+ (typed as jhfs+ ).
name can be whatever you want to name the drive (traditionally Macintosh HD). Make sure you use quotes if theres a space in the name.
size is how much of the pool that you want to make into a drive, using the following suffixes: B(ytes), S(512-byte-blocks), K(ilobytes), M(egabytes), G(igabytes), T(erabytes), P(etabytes), or () a percentage of the current size of the logical volume group.
Going off my previous example, my command would look like this:
diskutil coreStorage createVolume 50B457C3-ADC6-4EDC-9ABA-FD8C6EEDE69A jhfs+ 'Macintosh HD' 100 Thought Fusion Mac Os Catalina
That will create a volume named Macintosh HD, and fill the entire logical volume group (100), or all the space on the two drives. Enjoy!
Once that command is done, you have your Fusion Drive. You can now restore Mountain Lion back onto it, or do whatever you want. The only thing to remember is that they both need to be connected at the same time to work.
Hat tip: http://jollyjinx.tumblr.com
Fusion Mac Windows
Thought Fusion Mac Os Catalina
Ive written before about bootstrapping my development virtual infrastructure. When I did that I used an existing bare image VM I had lying around, but with CentOS 6 around the corner I wanted to document a process for creating a bare image from scratch.
First, you need CentOS 5.6 ISOs, so download CentOS if needed.
If youre using a version of OS X older than Yosemite, when typing the address on your Mac youll need to type smb:// first in the Connect to Server dialog box for example, smb://192.168.1.2. I thought APFS doesn't support Fusion Drive yet. More Less iMac with Retina 5K display, macOS High Sierra (10.13), 27, 2017.
We need to create a floppy drive with a FAT or EXT2 filesystem, with a ks.cfg file on it. On the mac this seems trickier than it should be. If you have an existing linux VM you can use that. If not, make a new default VM, then
attach the CentOS 5.6 part1 DVD iso as the DVD drive.
Run installer. Settings do not matter. Disable packages to make install go quickly.
shut down VM.
echo ' ' floppy144.flp , add floppy drive with that file.
start VM.
Lets make our floppy and put a kickstart file on it:
Note among other things the above settings disable the iptables firewall and disable selinux and use a plaintext password changeme12 . You should understand what that means and be happy with the security implications before you continue.
Shut down the VM, or at least unmount the floppy. If you made that VM just to create the floppy file, you can now throw that VM away. If youre writing your own kickstart file you may want to keep it around though in case you made a mistake, so you can go back easily and edit the file on the floppy.
Now were ready to start work on our image:
create new empty VM called vanilla-sandbox .
Resize the disk image to 10GB.
set RAM to 256MB.
disable just about all options including audio support, usb support, printer support, file sharing, etc.
set to NAT networking.
attach CentOS part1 DVD to cdrom drive.
attach floppy144.flp as a new floppy drive.
Start the VM.
At the prompt, type linux ks=floppy .
Wait until prompted, then press enter to reboot.
log in as root.
run yum -y update .
run find /var/cache -type f xargs rm -f .
shutdown -h now .
open the settings pane, open the hard disk panel, and select clean up disk.
disconnect and remove the floppy drive. Disconnect the DVD drive.
(optional), open the directory containing the VM location in the terminal and mv *.vmwarevm/* . rm -r *.vmwarevm . When you next open the VM (you will need to use File Open), select I moved it.
Make a backup copy of the virtual machine files, this is your clean VMWare-independent base VM.
Start the virtual machine.
in the Fusion menu, select Virtual Machine Install VMWare tools, and install the tools:
In the Fusion menu, select Virtual Machine CD/DVD Disconnect CD/DVD
Shut down the virtual machine
Make a backup copy of the virtual machine files, this is your clean VMWare-ready base VM.
So now you have one squeaky clean VM image and a documented process for recreating it. Of course, most of this process isnt particularly specific to CentOS, or VMWare, or Mac OS X. If you use different install media, these instructions work without changes for various versions of Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. According to this official ubuntu help page the same basic approach may work for recent Ubuntu releases (though replacing yum with apt-get ).
I seem to remember that on linux theres various more convenient ways to do this stuff. For example, you can install into a loopback device. But for now, this will do.
A Fusion Drive gives you the best of two worlds: the high storage capacity of a traditional platter-based hard drive, and the speed boost of a solid-state drive, without you having to manually manage files. Apple offers the Fusion Drive as build-to-order options for the $799 Mac mini and the upcoming iMac, but if you are willing, able, and have the parts, you can make your own Fusion Drive.
To build a Fusion Drive, you need to use the Terminal. Were going to lay out the commands you need in a way that most can understand, and you dont need to enter a lot of them. However, a warning to anyone who has never used the Terminal: Working with the Terminal isnt as simple as a graphic interface, as spelling counts and you dont always have a nice list of commands. You also need to be using OS X 10.8.2 or later. Gather your drives
You need two drives to make a Fusion Drive, and if you want to get the speed boost, one should be an SSD. In our setup, we used a Hitachi 1TB 2.5-inch hard drive (the one that ships in a Mac mini) and a 240GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD. Capsule fight! mac os. Clumsy fred mac os .
Apple chooses the drives they use based on extensive testing, which is why they recommend buying a Fusion Drive at the point of purchasing your Mac. Apple does not support users who have built their own Fusion Drive. (In our lab experiments, I was able to create a Fusion Drive with two flash thumb drives.) Back up your data
If you have anything that you want to keep on either of the drives, now is the time to back it up: linking the drives with CoreStorage, the technology behind the Fusion Drive, will erase them completely. If you need help with backing up your data, check out our guide on how to back up your data with Time Machine or, if you dont need to save absolutely everything on your drive, our more generic guide on backing up your data. Bust open Terminal
The Disk Utility application (Application Utilities Disk Utility) doesnt support the management or creation of Fusion Drives in its graphical interface, and knowing Apple, it might not ever support it. To create the Fusion Drive, well use Disk Utility, but the command line version that comes with every Mac. (Learn more about the Disk Utility command line.)
If you arent going to include the drive you booted from in a Fusion Drive, you can open the Terminal app (Applications Utilities Terminal). This would be the case, say, if youre using a Mac Pro with multiple drive bays, since you can format them both externally.
If you want to include your current boot drive as part of the Fusion Drive, youre going to need to boot into recovery mode and run Terminal from there. The CoreStorage process used to fuse the drives also formats them, and you cant do that to a drive used as the boot drive. You can boot into recovery mode by holding Command+R when starting up your Mac, and open Terminal from there.
One last thing to note: If youre using a Mac currently in Apples product line, such as the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro or the new Mac mini, you cant use just any old install disc as a boot disc. Those machines require a special version of Mountain Lion thats not yet in the App Store. So in this circumstance, recovery mode is your best bet. Make the drive
Once you have the Terminal open, youre ready to get to creating the Fusion Drive.
List the drives you system can see. Use the following command to list the drives attached to your system:
diskutil list
This will list the drives like this:
The drive mount points are labeled /dev/disk . Make a note of the mount points for the disks you want to make into a Fusion Drive. In our example, /dev/disk0 is the boot disk, while /dev/disk1 and /dev/disk2 are the SSD and hard drive (respectively) that we want to put together as a Fusion Drive. An easy way to tell drives apart is by their size and their name. Make sure you dont confuse them, as the Terminal doesnt give much warning before wiping your drive. Parallels Mac
Create a logical volume group. Lets create a CoreStorage logical volume group, the pool of data that will be made from the combined space of our physical drives. Megaparsec mac os . Use the following format of the diskutil command:
diskutil coreStorage create nameYourThing drive1 drive2
Going off the example using /dev/disk1 and /dev/disk2 as the drives to combine, I simply type:
diskutil coreStorage create myLogicalVolGroup /dev/disk1 /dev/disk2
When the process is done, your logical volume group should be completed and the command will finish by presenting you with a unique identifier for the group, which you should copy to your clipboard. It should look similar to this:
Create a logical volume. Now that we have a logical volume group, we can create the logical volume, what your Mac will recognize as a single drive. Use the following format of the diskutil command: Fusion Mac Windows
diskutil coreStorage createVolume lvgUUID type name size
lvgUUID is the unique identifier you copied from the previous step.
type use Journaled HFS+ (typed as jhfs+ ).
name can be whatever you want to name the drive (traditionally Macintosh HD). Make sure you use quotes if theres a space in the name.
size is how much of the pool that you want to make into a drive, using the following suffixes: B(ytes), S(512-byte-blocks), K(ilobytes), M(egabytes), G(igabytes), T(erabytes), P(etabytes), or () a percentage of the current size of the logical volume group.
Going off my previous example, my command would look like this:
diskutil coreStorage createVolume 50B457C3-ADC6-4EDC-9ABA-FD8C6EEDE69A jhfs+ 'Macintosh HD' 100 Thought Fusion Mac Os Catalina
That will create a volume named Macintosh HD, and fill the entire logical volume group (100), or all the space on the two drives. Enjoy!
Once that command is done, you have your Fusion Drive. You can now restore Mountain Lion back onto it, or do whatever you want. The only thing to remember is that they both need to be connected at the same time to work.
Hat tip: http://jollyjinx.tumblr.com
