Pardon me for saying this, but if your IT guy says that, he shouldn't be your IT guy, and I only say this because I'm very confident of my assertion. He has absolutely no idea how a virtualization application like Parallels (or Virtual Box) works, does not have the curiosity to investigate and learn, and made and assertion about a purely technological issue without having any experience or knowledge on the subject, based solely on wrong assumptions. This results in infusing people with wrong ideas and false issues, like the one presented, because after all, he is the 'IT guy'.
The virtualized OS (Guest) doesn't talk directly with the GPU, nor the screen, or other pieces of hardware, there is a level of abstraction in between. Don't forget that the mouse, keyboard, screen, GPU, etc, are working for the Host system primarily, the Guest could never step over the Host, only the Host OS can have direct access to hardware.
The only piece of hardware that the VM is allowed to talk directly to is the CPU through a technology that specifically supports virtualization. And in case you are wondering, yes, SL can talk directly with CPU made years after it has been released because the architecture is the same (x86 or x64).
The reason why VBox crashed does not have to be related to hardware abstraction, or the hardware not being supported by the OS.
There is a virtualization technology that allows for VMs to talk directly with GPU, but requires more than one GPU and isn't supported in PDM anyway.
The fact that SLS is supported means, among other things, that the hardware is presented to the Guest OS in a way that the Guest OS understands, ie, has drivers for.
Finally, you always have the possibility of running PDM as a trial if you are still unsure.
Last edited: Oct 31, 2014