Once you find OS X Mavericks, click download. Open up the App Store and search for Mavericks. There are several applications you can use: VMWare Fusion (pay), Paralells (pay), and Virtual Box (free). I’ll be using Virtual Box for this demo. To set up your virtual environment you’ll need an application to run the virtual machine. At least 30gb of free space on your Hard Drive.Running virtual machines requires a bit of horse power. These specs aren’t required, but they’re strongly suggested: With that out of the way, let’s get into the instructions.

This blog post assumes that you’ve already downloaded the installer for FileMaker Server and have your licensing information handy. The other caveat, which should be obvious, is you have to own a license for FileMaker Server and you need FileMaker Pro or FileMaker Pro Advanced installed on your local machine. Also, to be able to legally use Mavericks as a virtual machine, you must be on a mac, running mavericks.

If enough people tweet me, asking for the windows version, I’ll write another post. I’m more comfortable with nix environments so, I’m writing my outline for a mac setup. To make a virtual development environment for use with FileMaker Server, you have two (2) OS flavor choices: MacOS or Windows. There are plenty of articles out on the web that explain why virtual development environments are advantageous, that’s not what I want to cover. I was really wishing that I could do the same thing with my FileMaker development environment … so I set one up. With tools like vagrant and virtual box, it’s incredibly simple to start up and shut down virtual machines that are tailored to your project. Recently, I’ve switched to using virtual machines for almost all of my web development environments and it has been fantastic.

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