Parallels: How does it work ?

1

1000

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 2, 2005
Messages
426
Hi there all.

I have been playing around with OSX recently after years of being a Windows junkie. I installed Parallels the other day and am really enjoying being able to use both operating systems.

I had one question though, when I start Parallels, obviously I am running Windows 7 in a "virtual machine" but does OSX also switch over and run virtually ? Or am I simply running OSX "natively" with a Windows 7 virtual machine embedded ?
 
You are running OS X which is the parent hypervisor OS. Parallels creates a virtual machine which you are running Windows 7 as a guest OS.
 
So there should be little to no performance degradation in OSX ? I have 8gb installed in the iMac and have 2 cores dedicated to the virtual machine so it should have ample resources ?
 
Not by just having Parallels installed. Of course if it's running and the VM is running and using lots of resources then your host OS will take a hit while those VM resources are in use.
 
You will have better performance if you switch the VM to use only 1 core, not 2.
 
danman said:
You will have better performance if you switch the VM to use only 1 core, not 2.
Click to expand...

His iMac is a Quad? how so? Do you think that turbo boost would kick in more between OS X and the VM if he limited the VM to 1 core instead of 2?
 
I may be going off-topic here, but would anyone of you have any experience with Parallel Desktop 5 for Mac? Since I work with XP and OS X (courtesy of Bootcamp) I guess investing in PD5 could be useful. Your suggestions please :)
 
vmware fusion and parallels desktop both have free trials, why not just take them for a test drive. alternatively just use virtualbox since that's free.

oh, and for those who would like to know a bit more about virtualisation in general, head over to the virtualisation sub-forum and check out the sticky thread, lots of useful information in there.
 
I can only speak to Parallels Desktop 5 as it's the only one I have extensive experience using. It's fantastic, it integrates with OSX very effectively and it does the job it's designed to do very well.

The only caveat is that I've heard it's memory hungry.. 8gb RAM seems to be far better than 4gb RAM in my experience.. you can run bucketloads of OSX apps, Windows 7 apps (all 64bit on my system) and still have 2.5-3gb free memory.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top