Lion Guest issues (many) under Parallels 7

R

ronparr

Bit poster
I'm seeing a lot of issues after just a few minutes of experimentation:

- command-q quits parallels and is not passed on the guest OS. This means that I'm constantly accidentally quitting parallels, which causes my guest Mac OS to suspend.

- Returning from suspend, frequently freezes up the guest Mac OS.

- Changing guest screen resolution causes some annoying flickering for a while.

- Performance in the guest OS is not that snappy. I was surprised that I can play back videos in an ubuntu guest better than I can in a guest Mac OS.

- VLC doesn't work in the guest OS (trying the same version that works fine on the host OS).

- About this Mac overview puts ??? after the available memory (I guess this is b/c it can't figure out what type of memory it is?).

- There's no warning on the bottom of the window that parallels tools needs to be installed even though they must be installed to use any resolution other that 1024x768.

- It's not clear if 3D graphics are supported. The preferences for the virtual machine indicates that there is support, but basic applications like the 3D graphing capability in the built-in grapher utility don't work, but rotating the 3D chess board does seem to work (albeit very sluggishly and without any anti-aliasing). This seems to suggest little or no hardware help with 3D.
 
I'm just getting going with a Lion guest OS and I can second a few of the above:

it's not just cmd-Q that's not mapped. Almost none of the special keyboard shortcuts are mapped. Cmd-W closes the Parallels window, volume and expose keys map to the Host OS (Snow Leopard). Cmd-tab cycles the Host OS apps, etc. This even happens in full-screen. Things like Cmd-, and Cmd-I in the guest Finder, do map properly, however.

Every now and again (sometimes when scaling the Parallels window or changing back and forth from Full Screen) a bar of white pixels appears just under the menu bar in the guest OS. Moving windows around tends to cause this to redraw.

The performance indeed seems a bit sluggish. My host is a 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with 8 Gigs. 4 Gig is given to the Lion guest. All VM settings are set to give faster VM performance.

My About this Mac, however, does show my RAM properly.

Also there doesn't seem to be any linking of clipboards. I can't copy on the host and paste on the guest, for example. It's been a little while but I'm pretty sure I've done that in my WinXP guest.
 
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Performance of Lion Guest is terrible. I was thinking if it was 10.7.1 causing the problem so I reinstall 10.7 and is the same. I couldn't imagine if the server version of Parallels was doing the same under 10.6.

Luckily I was not the only one, which is on a i7 16G Ram iMac 2009.
 
Lion guest

Just to confirm that I have experienced many of the same issues described by ronparr. The good news is that my WinXP, Win7 and Ubuntu VMs appear fine and not looking like I need to go back to v6 for existing uses. This is pretty much a beta test of Lion guest from my perspective and while it is good to play with it is far from ready to do anything more than experiment for a while until we've had a couple of fix releases. It would be good to fix some of the cosmetics too ... rather strange to have to use "install Windows from DVD" option to install Lion.
 
Lion Guest

I am finding Lion guest performance excellent on my newish MacBook Pro 2.2GHz i7 with 8Gb RAM and a 7200RPM HD. I set the VM to 2 processors and gave it 3Gb of RAM. I am also very pleased with the increased performance of my three Windows VMs (an old XP VM upgraded since Parallels 2; Vista and 7).

I have two problems working with the Lion VM: First, the inconsistent passing of keyboard commands - or not - to the guest OS, Cmd-Q being the most disturbing. Second, and most critically, the Lion guest OS seems incapable of recovering when the host OS awakens from sleep. This is a fundamental flaw that should not have made it into a final release.
 
some added info

My machine is a 3.4 Ghz core i7 (2011 BTO 27" iMac) with 16 GB of RAM (of which 2 were allocated to the guest). I let the guest use all 4 cores. For comparison, video playback was smoother on an ubuntu guest with just 2 cores.

My boot drive is an SSD, but the virtual drive for the guest is stored on a magnetic drive.
 
Lion Guest

This is my first time using Parallels and I purchased specifically to virtualize Lion. I'm seeing all of these issues plus when using the Terminal on the VM the tilde key is totally different. Also since the VM only sees a normal wheel mouse gestures are not available, and I had to download a scroll reverser program to get scroll to work. I hope these issues are addressed...Lion on Lion is almost unusable at this point. (I am impressed with the mobile app though!)
 
Fixing Command Q and Command W

I found a fix elsewhere in the forums to fix Command Q and Command W.

Go to Parallels preferences, and click on Keyboard, Mac OS X profile.
Map Command+Q to Command+Q. Same for Command+W.
 
Hello,
I have also detected a few problems, the biggest one for me is the mouse pointer, sometimes when I am in the VM and I click on an icon, it doesn't work. In fact, the pointer doesn't show the real place where the mouse is. (sorry, it's hard to explain the problem very well as english is not my native language)
If I shut down the VM and quit Parallels and start all over again it sometimes work. It's really annoying as it is impossible to work correctly for my job. (This problem only occurs under Mac OS X, under Windows it is ok)
 
clipboard not shared

I'm sorry to be a harbinger of bad news... but if it helps the developers out.... I've noticed that the clipboard is not shared when Lion is a guest. This is a huge hinderance to using Lion in a VM for development.

Though overall I do have to say that PDT7 is a winner, hopefully these issues will get resolved!
 
disk writes seem to hang

I see a pattern on large file writes not finishing

Xcode install went to about 99% and hung

coping a folder from shared folder into local with 150 files crashed
making a zip and copying worked
 
I have the same issues. I was appalled at how cranky it is. the 3D is clearly not H/W accelerated. I run the same software in a Windows 7 VM with half the RAM and it runs perfectly, with Lion as the guest OS it is awful.

Can someone confirm what the 3D checkbox is intending to do, because it seems to make no difference whether I have it ticked or unticked, which suggest there's no H/W accel. going on at all...

I can't even stream the iOS/iPhone videos form Apple.com smoothly.

I will be looking at VMWare for the first time. EXTREMELY disappointed to have burnt £35 upgrading.
 
I noticed a few days ago that ~ started working for me again...perhaps this was fixed with the latest release?
 
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