Today Apple has made available their newest addition to the Mac lineup: the iMac Pro, and we couldn’t be more excited about the prospects of such a powerful Mac, particularly as the most capable Mac based virtual machine host ever, running VMware Fusion.
Early reviewers have touted the “Blazing Fast” performance that this hardware offers, with both CPU and on GPU, but the new machine isn’t exactly for everyone.
With the iMac Pro, Apple returns to it’s roots with an offering aimed at professionals and power users.
Recently Apple held a media event attended by press, industry analysts and others, to showcase some of the capabilities of such a powerful machine and what it might be used for.
During this event it was reported that Apple demoed VMware Fusion as a professional app that can make full use of this new hardware performance. More than just running Windows on the Mac, Apple showed an end-to-end development and testing pipeline built using virtual machines running on a single machine.
Obviously use cases for Video/Audio editing, 3D/CAD design were discussed, but to quote this Macworld article: By Roman Loyola
“Most impressive was a demo of Apple’s Xcode, which ran several UI tests and VMware Fusion virtual machines at the same time without the iMac Pro breaking a sweat.“
From a single iMac Pro using VMware Fusion you could rapidly architect an entire development pipeline complete with SCM, an automated build system, automated UI testing, development and staging environments, topped off with a series of different ‘desktop’ VM’s to test the application with.
Leveraging pre-built packages like those from Bitnami, users can quickly grab all the building blocks for this kind of modern “DevOps” environment. (quotes because I get that DevOps is a buzzword referring to Agile development tools with a goal of continuous iteration and or delivery and an accompanying cultural movement… ).
A user could for example tie together a GitLab VM for SCM; Jenkins, GitLab or Gradle for build and pipeline; some stack for the Dev and Stage environments (LAMP, Node.js, Tomcat, etc…); Redmine, Trac or Mantis for Bug Tracking; JFrog for your artifact/binary repository and then ReviewBoard for team code collaboration.
For folks on the more traditional IT Pro or datacenter admin, this machine is powerful enough to run the complete VMware solution lab from a single desktop. You could easily run the vCenter Server Appliance, several ESXi hosts, vSAN, vRealize suite, and more, all thanks to the common underlying VMware platform and the incredible resources from these new machines.
The possibilities are endless thanks to the amazing abstraction that VMware virtualization provides, and the sheer power that this new Apple hardware delivers, and we can’t wait to fill our office with them.
Did you order the iMac Pro? Which spec? Tell us in the discussion below!
