Advantage of using bootcamp with Parallels vs. pure VM

Can anyone provide some pros/cons of installing parallels using a bootcamp partition vs. just running parallels as a pure VM? I am getting reading to set up a new MBA w/ 8gb RAM and was wondering if there are pros/cons to either method.

 

With Boot Camp you have the option of running under Boot Camp. With any VM there's some overhead that you wouldn't have with Boot Camp.

 

The pro of bootcamp is that you can run Windows natively if you so wish by booting Mac into Windows. That's it. Might be important for a particular application that requires more RAM, or if you need to run DirectX 11 apps (some games for instance).

The con is that it's less portable, it's a partition on a disk instead of a .pvm package that you can transfer from disk to disk easily.

 

So I can allocate/use more RAM using the bootcamp approach for the windows side?

 

takeshi - What exactly do you mean by "more overhead" and what affect does that have? Sorry, I'm somewhat of a newbie on this...

 

The main advantage to using Boot Camp with Parallels is that you always have the choice to restart into Boot Camp if you need the extra power. The disadvantage to Boot Camp is the fixed dedication of part of the hard drive. Another disadvantage is that Boot Camp Assistant requires the Macintosh HD to be one volume and not partitioned. After the installation, creating extra partitions may mess up the Mac's booting and prevent Windows from showing up in the boot menu.

The main advantage to creating a pure VM is that the disk is easily resizable (yes, there are ways to resize the Boot Camp partition, but not as easily). Other than that, I don't think there's any other advantage.

 

You can use all the RAM if you boot natively into Windows. When running as a VM in Parallels under OSX the amount of RAM you can use is the same either if VM is based on Bootcamp or not. I'm not sure you understand the concept of how this works.

 

Parallels vs Bootcamp

So would you say that running Parallels as a VM, in general, takes up a significant amount of your RAM? I have an 8GB RAM 1600 mhz, 2.3 GHz intel.

 

It takes whatever amount of RAM that is used inside the VM up to the limit you assign. Don't forget you are running a full OS and apps inside another OS.

Example, a Windows 8 VM will consume at least 2GB while in use.