OT: Would you care to share your experiences deploying Dual Boot Mac's - Would you mind sharing your thoughts in a quick survey

[tu-egadsby]

Dear Friends,

Good morning. At the MacAdmins Conference at Penn State I will be presenting on "Is Dual Booting in the Enterprise Worth It?” I would like to share real-world experiences that fellow admins and service providers have had implementing and keeping up dual boot environments. If you be kind enough to fill out this brief survey I would appreciate it: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1GA-PzwUgsjD3Cy_Jg8j1RDOU2I2rV06ZeljM6vODf6s/viewform.

The conference is next week so if you feel like you can help please try to fill it out this week. Thanks in advance!

Sincerely,

Eric Gadsby

[m_donovan]

Eric,

The topic of the benefits (or lack there of) of dual booting is a major discussion point around our office. This happens to be the exact task I am working on now. I am trying to find a deployable solution to dual boot OS X El Capitan with Windows 10. With the introduction of SIP getting a deployable dual boot image has been a challenge. Do you know of anybody that has this working with Casper imaging?

Mike

[tu-egadsby]

Mike,

Thanks for responding, if you haven't please reply to the survey.

I have not tried dual booting with El Capitan and Windows 10 though it is coming. The best way I have found to get a Windows deployed using Casper Imaging is to use WinClone to make a package of our image and have it install as a post install task in CI. We have had problems because the way CI installs WinClone images on it's own is to copy the image to your CI boot disk (in my case a USB drive) first and then clone it over. Our USB drives fill and the process fails without much explanation in the logs.

I will learn about SIP issues this summer... can't wait!

[mdonovan]

Survey form completed.

[Look]

Survey completed and as per the comments I made there.

With the introduction of SIP and Windows 10 it has become technically much more difficult to achieve, throw in Apple's poor driver support and none standard hardware ( like 5k iMacs that pretend to have one monitor but the Windows driver actually sees it as two, then you throw a projector into the mix and it becomes a total mess). The cost benefit is declining every year and where as you used to do it for convenience you now really only do it out of necessity.

I cannot really see it being worth it for a business any more, however in an educational environment like ours where you have completely different requirements in a room hour by hour as classes change there is still some small gains to be made.

The other thing on the horizon (and in fact implemented in some organisations) is large scale virtualisation of both applications and whole environments, this will further reduce the requirement for dual boot as some cross platform requirements will be easily met with virtualised solutions.

[tu-egadsby]

Hello Again! Thanks to those who have already shared your thoughts, I appreciate it! If anybody else would like to chime in please feel free to do so! Again the a survey is at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1GA-PzwUgsjD3Cy_Jg8j1RDOU2I2rV06ZeljM6vODf6s/viewform. Thanks again!

Sincerely,

Eric T Gadsby

[Emmert]

With the amount of person-hours wasted on supporting our dual boot lab with various methods over the years, it might have been cheaper to just buy some low-end Dells and Minis have them share a monitor. I definitely think we won't consider it an option going forward.

[tu-egadsby]

Clint,

Thanks! My I quote you? Would mind filling out the survey? Thanks!

[JustDeWon]

We just bypass the headaches of dual booting, and instead used VMWare Fusion.app with a Windows image on it.. Seems to be the trick for the most part..

[Emmert]

Certainly, I've already completed your survey. Good luck with your presentation!