I've been trying to run Windows XP SP3 and Windows 2003 R2 Server SP1 on Parallels at the same time. My iMac becomes very unstable and sometimes it just won't respond. I would have to hold down the power button to shut it down. Is it even possible to run more than 1 guest OS environment with Parallels at the same time?
Yes, I often run OpenSuse 10.3 with a windows XP pro SP3 session. However, I have 4 GB of ram, and have allocated 768 for windows and 512 for linux. How much memory are you allocating for your virtual machines, and how much do you have left for OS X?
i left them as default so my XP has 512MB and 2003 Server has 384MB. i can't understand why my Mac becomes unstable if it's memory allocation on the guest OS. i'll try to bump it up. thanks for the tip.
Hi, Actually, you might get even more problems. I think you might be running out of memory. What is the value of the paging on both the XP and 2003 server, and what are you doing with them? You might need to have more memory allocated for these, but then you might run out of memory on the OS X side. As a rule of thumb I try to make sure I have at least 1 Gb for OS X, and even then I don't run a lot of programs while doing this (usually, mail and safari). If you have too much paging allocated in XP and 2003, what happens is that you are constantly swapping out memory to disk in XP and 2003 (by experience, just to run .Net 2 and IIS I would use at least 1Gb of ram on the 2003 server).
Probably the best solution to put them on different hard disk, for example one on boot disk, another one on external
