How well does adobe photoshop work with VMware/virtual box?

[glacier922]

Anyone used photoshop in a virtual environment? If so, how well did it work for you? What version of photoshop and how much system resources do you give it?thanks.

[easy.bake.oven]

I dont use vmware/virtual box but just wanted to say I use cs5 portable 325mb total folder/file size

[MM78]

Originally Posted by glacier922

Anyone used photoshop in a virtual environment? If so, how well did it work for you? What version of photoshop and how much system resources do you give it?thanks.

Going to depend on a few factors:
1. How much CPU you have allocated to the VMWare
2. How much RAM you have allocated to the VMWare
3. Which version of Photoshop you go with, perhaps an older version will work better.

Going to test this out with photoshop portable.

[MM78]

So I did a test with the following:
1. Windows XP
2. 2GB Ram
3. 30GB HDD
4. Adobe Photoshop CS4 Portable

Opened in seconds without problems.

[glacier922]

How much processor speed did u dedicate that with? Or did u just do it natively on your pc?

[BiN4RY]

Just wondering, why do you want to use photoshop in a VM?

[glacier922]

Photoshop has tons of bloatware within it, plus, downloading it from torrents, well, if there was an infection, I'd rather it infect the VM.

[glacier922]

Also, I'd like to add that I just bought a very nice gaming laptop that I enjoy playing the newest pc games at full settings. Installing software like cs4 is gonna ruin the computer, heck, even the latest version, if u buy directly from adobe is gonna ruin your computer, just restart your computer and you'll see all background crap they put in there. Now all my high settings will have to go to medium settings.

So I try to be a minimalist when installing software. I only have steam and virtual box installed on my main computer. The virtual machines is when I get to do a little more experimenting.

[MM78]

Originally Posted by glacier922

How much processor speed did u dedicate that with? Or did u just do it natively on your pc?

1 Processor....what I did was the following:
I have my "Folder sharing" activated on all my VMWares, So I downloaded my Portable Photoshop CS4 to my Portable 1TB Hdd, then I ran the Photoshop via my shared folder.

Hope that makes sense.

[easy.bake.oven]

cs5 portable uses about 300mb physical ram..... thats with nothing loaded in it as in images, so just a blank page.

I checked it on my system.

I been using it for a few years and no probs with virus or anything.

I can leave it open in the background for days and no memory leaks and stuff so its stable.

[glacier922]

Originally Posted by MM78

1 Processor....what I did was the following:
I have my "Folder sharing" activated on all my VMWares, So I downloaded my Portable Photoshop CS4 to my Portable 1TB Hdd, then I ran the Photoshop via my shared folder.

Hope that makes sense.

Ok, I think I got it. You have shared folder on both your main computer and virtual machine. You run your virtual machine, open the shared folder from the virtual machine to see how well photoshop works, am I right?

[MM78]

So let me show you how it looks inside my VMWare.....
1st. I setup my VMWare to share my 1TB HDD with the VMWare...so I can access the files on my 1TB HDD.


2nd. Once I have setup the Folder Sharing, this is what it looks like in "My Computer", inside the VMWare. The Shared Folder shows up as a Network Drive or "Shared Folders on 'vmware-host' (Z"


3rd. Once I open the Shared folders (Z I can navigate over to my Portable Phoshop.....FYI, This is how I run my Portable Firefox inside my VMWare...

[glacier922]

Wow, that's a great setup mm78. I never thought about having all your firefox portable files on a separate drive on a main computer, and then have the virtual machine access it. That's new to me. Now that damn virtual machine file size won't keep getting bigger and bigger.

But back to photoshop, I'd probably put the EXE file inside the VM though, because if you're running a Windows computer as your main machine, I could accidentally click on it, and if it's a virus, Doh, dammit! But then again, Adobe is a virus in of itself.

[MM78]

Yeah, you could run photoshop within the VMWare itself if you wanted too.