I just got a MBP, and am giving parallels a try. It looks really exciting, but I have a few questions. If windows gets a virus, and or craches etc, can it also crash osx, or is it separate. Also I thought I heard there was a way to make an image of the installed windows so that in the event that it needs to be reinstalled we can just copy a fresh image over. I see that there is an image tool, but is that what this is for, and if so do I need to use it before I install windows, or after? Maybe I'm just missing this stuff, but I cant seem to find much info, and tutorials on the parallels website, and I dont understand why they dont have more step by step instructions for guys like me lol... Thanks.. Gavin
VM is a sandbox. Unless you have shared folders any virus that infects the VM will never get out to the host (OS X). Backing up an image is simple. You just... copy the whole thing somewhere. Then when things go bad replace the bad one with the one you copied earlier. You'll find the image under ~/Library/Parallels. Oh, and please, please read the instruction manual (it's a PDF file) thoroughly.
Windows in a VM is still Windows. It's still just as insecure as any other Windows machine, and you need to treat it as Yet Another Windows Machine so far as your network is concerned. This means staying on top of updates, antivirus defs, antispyware/antimalware programs, etc... So far as the Mac side of the machine is concerned, files in any non-shared directory should be safe, as Windows has no access to them. Files in shared directories are at risk, as a virus infecting Windows would be able to access them. The only crash possibility I can think of is if a Windows crash also trips something in the Parallels kexts (OSX kernel extensions used by Parallels) - which could possibly trigger an OSX crash. I haven't seen that happen *yet*. To backup your VM, find a directory in /Users/[your username]/Library/Parallels/ that contains two files - a .hdd file (the disk image), and a .pvs file (the VM settings). Backup that directory for a complete copy of your VM, or only the .hdd file for just the disk. So far as OSX is concerned, these are just files, so you can copy/move as you wish. You can even burn a .hdd file to DVD (just don't try to run it from there!)
Sounds Good Thanks for the help. I figured that's how the security would work, but I'm new at this whole virt machine stuff. Also I am fine with reading the manual, but I did not see it on the site, or when I downloaded the software. Doubtless I just missed it, but can you direct me where to look for it. Also is there a way to increase the hard drive partition on the windows side without reinstalling windows?
Re: Parallels Security Maybe. If you have free space on the boot drive, you won't have to reformat the entire thing. However you should copy off an image to another removable HD, so in case something goes wrong, you can recreate it on your startup drive. In fact, if it was me, I'd have a backup of the entire drive before doing anything about installing Parallels or reinstalling it. But then I'm paranoid about doing backups in the first place. YMMV.
