OpenGL and Graphics Issues

Hi,

We have a kind-of specific use of Parallels. We use it in the private "Cloud" though RDP (Windows) or RDC (Mac). With Parallels Desktop 8 we have discovered two major issues:

Issue 1: When Graphics acceleration is on (DirectX 9 or 10) the VM becomes practically unusable in the Remote Environment. The only way to overcome the issue of non-existing screen refresh was to deactivate it. This made the VM usuable.

Issue 2: It looks like that the graphics handling in Parallels 8 slows down some refresh actions within VNC. We know it sounds odd, but we need to use VNC through RDP to access other Remote Macs. The issue we have is that OpenGL 2.0 doesn't seem to be found, even if we re-activated the DirectX 9 or 10 support. More specifically we try to test the application Remotix (nulana.com) that claims a fast and reliable VNC.

Note 1: For the sake of information it is interesting to know that a WinXP machine that recently crashed (hardware failure) used to provide a much faster VNC experience than the VM under Parallels 8, despite the 7 years old components.

Note 2:. We never encountered any problem with Parallels 7 with regard to RDC (Mac) while installing, starting or controlling the VM.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Agamemnon

 

Update: Issue 1 happens with a Mac Mountain Lion Mini Server. With a Retina MacBook Pro, it was fine.

 

I can confirm this too. We have two Mac Mountain Lion Mini Servers. One just has a couple of Windows Servers running on it and it's fine. The other one has a Windows 7 PC and for the last week I've been trying to get it to work with Mac Remote Desktop but could not view it properly.

I can cure this (as the OP suggests above) by disabling hardware acceleration in hardware->video.

Looks like a bug that only affects the Mac Mini Server and Windows 7 or 8?

 

It appears ARD have display refresh problems in OpenGL apps when no physical display is attached to Mac...

 

I think ARD is fine. It's a parallels problem that seems to occur running Windows 7 (possibly other OSs) on a Mac Mini Server. It does not happen on our other Mac Mini Server which only runs Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. Neither of these two servers have a physical display attached to them.

 

Is 3D acceleration enabled for your 2k3 and 2k8 VMs?
What if you do attach the display to mini which runs 7?

 

Yes, all our server and client VMs are configured with the defaults for video hardware which has acceleration turned on.

I'm a couple of thousand miles away from the server in question so can't try any physical changes (like attaching a monitor) at the moment.

 

I see. Are these minis the same model/year?

 

Yes indeed. They are both brand new. Mac mini with OS X Server 2.6Ghz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 upgraded to 16GB memory.

 

Well, to complicate things, we actually confirm the opposite.

- Windows Server 2008 R2 on Mountain Lion is unusable with hardware acceleration.

- Windows Pro 7 on Mac Book Retina Pro was installed fine over ARD.

_
So, ARD is not the issue on my opinion. Same stuff with VNC from Windows. Any ideas from Parallels?

 

I still think ARD has problems in OpenGL apps on Macs with no display attached. Your facts are perfectly in line with this:
W2k8 on a Mac mini (apparently with no display) have problems with 3D acceleration enabled. When you disable 3D, Parallels stops using OpenGL and it works fine.
MBP does have display attached (internal panel) and have no problems even with 3D enabled.

 

I see the point, but: we also run a headless Mac Mini Lion Server with PD 7 and Win 2008 R2 Server. Same access through ARD, no problems at all with hardware acceleration on.

 

There must be something different going on between Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 / 2003 and the use of hardware acceleration. I can't find any other web references to this problem. Are we really the only two to have experienced it?

 

There's absolutely no difference, especially from ARD viewpoint.

Could you generate problem reports via Parallels Help menu from your servers (one with W2k8 and one with 7) and post report IDs here. We'll see if I can find anything peculiar there.