Of VM woes…

Tuesday, 27 September, 2016

Actually not so much VM woes as out-of-date underlying OS. Yes, the new term is hitting so I thought it appropriate to upgrade ArcGIS to the same version used on campus - that meant going from 10.2.1 to 10.4. Simples I thought - just request the student/instructor license, download the EXE and away we go.

Of course in reality things are never quite so simple. I won’t allow ArcGIS near my native OS because it is such a behemoth of an application - so I run it in a VM. Its slower, but locked down and if it dies, well I can just spin it up in the VM again. I use the excellent (and cross-platform) Portable VirtualBox) and, because its portable, I can copy it onto my portable hard drive and take it with (just make sure your drive is exFAT formatted for those large VDI files). Anyway, after the EXE download and install fails telling me to upgrade to Windows 7 (yes, the VM is on 7, I have an 8.1 and the main system on 10) to SP1. One upgrade later and…. upgrade .NET to 4.5+. And then… my virtual disk runs out of space. Its sized to 25Gb, but with ArcGIS, Imagine and Cyclone on there its run out of space. A little head scratching (and Googling later) led me to this page outlining the VirtualBox command to increase the VDI file (why you can’t do this in the GUI I don’t know!):

VBoxManage modifyhd windows7.vdi —resize 30000

Finally, inside Windows, expand the partition to take up all the virtual drive space.

Bingo, ArcGIS finally installs.

Whilst these are quite frustrating hoops to jump through, it does at least make you aware of some of the hurdles that students face.

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