Parallels Desktop for Mac 3.0 Performance

Hello Everyone,

I am a new Mac user, long time PC user. I am currently using Parallels Workstation on my PC to run a copy of XP to use for Software development. The performance of Parallels under Vista is OK, but nothing to write home about. So my question is about the new Mac release of Parallels Desktop for Mac. How does it run? If I were to purchase it and, run a copy of XP with MS Office, would it perform worse or better than just buying a copy of Office 2004 for Mac? I know this questionis relative, but I am just looking for other user's opinions. My Mac is a 17" iMac Core 2 Duo with 1 GB of RAM. Thanks in advance for your advice.

 

I find that Office under virtualized XP works a whole lot better than Office 2004 on the Mac. 2004 is a PPC-only app and runs under Rosetta, OS X's PPC emulation layer. It's usable, but slow. Office 2008 should be a lot better since it'll be a Universal binary.

Either way, if you're going to run Parallels, you'll want 2 GB of physical RAM. Turning off all the visual glitz in both OS X and Windows speeds everything up quite a bit. Also, fixed-size virtual drives are better than resizable drives, performance-wise, and placing them on an external physical drive (Firewire being lots better than USB) is even better.

I'm a .Net developer and I work all day in an XP VM. I give it 1 GB and both sides of the house are happy. I do e-mail, IM, Web surfing, etc. in OS X and my dev work in XP. I can't speak to Vista performance, but I'd expect that if it were tuned for performance it'd behave pretty much like XP.

 

MMischke - having tweaked parallels for many months, I agree with pretty much everything you said - especially your point about fixed-sized drives. But I have a 500 GB physical HD so setting aside 100GB for my fixed-drive VM on my HD is no big deal. I use external drives (firewire, USB, thumb drives) for data only - no apps.

It seems to me that if you have the spare space, a decent-sized fixed-size VM on a fixed HD would always run faster than on any firewire drive. Am I mistaken?

 

I have been running XP Pro with an expandable drive (MBP Core 2 Duo, 3 GB RAM; 100 GB drive with 70 GB data; 3.65 GB Parallels 2.5 .hdd). I am mainly using QuickBooks Pro 2007, plus checking the appearance of some Web sites in IE and Firefox.

Do you think I would benefit from a fixed-size drive? If so, what size should I give it?

Thank you,

David

 

@John: The biggest problem I see with expanding drives is that there's no way to keep them defragmented. If you defrag the guest volume, you fragment the .hdd file on the host volume. If you defrag the .hdd file then any defragmentation that's been done on the virtualized volume is defeated. I may be overlooking something here, so pls let me know if I am.

I prefer to run VMs from external drives because of the serial nature of disk access. When a VM is on the same physical disk as the host OS, the two OSs will be competing for access to the disk. Running the VM from a different drive removes this bottleneck. However, as you point out, it's not cut and dry. Your internal 500 GB drive is on a much faster bus than an external would be. It comes down to whether or not parallelized disk access across a slower bus beats serialized disk access on a faster bus. I've always felt that it does, but with all the new advances in disk technology (SATA 2.0, NCQ, etc.) it may be time to do some benchmarking... ;-)

@David: Since your use case doesn't sound overly demanding, I'd suggest staying with the expanding VM. Fixed Windows drives are typically in the 10-30 GB range and I'd be hesitant to use up that much space when you've only got 30 GB left on the drive. Most folks will be very happy with expanding drives. The tweaks I've suggested are mainly applicable to scenarios in which performance must be maximized, such as software development. In other situations they're probably overkill.

 

I have been using Parallels since it first came out and I recently upgraded to V3.0. Across all of these versions, I have been using the same Windows XP Professional VM that I created with the original version of Parallels. This VM is configured for 512MB of memory and two virtual partitions which show up as drives C: and D: inside XP. I use this VM primarly for running MS Money 2006 and MS OneNote 2007. I also use it to build my .NET app using Visual Studio 2005. This VM runs constantly on my Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo. The only time I shut it down is during Windows Update and when I run my weekly full backup. Overall, I am quite pleased with the performance of this VM. I am also quite pleased with the stability. I believe this VM has locked up only twice over the past 7 months and both times, it was due to trying to use the Suspend VM functionality inside Parallels.

 

@Keith: It's great to hear other success stories here. I, too, am still running a VM which I created long ago (PDM 2.0, build 1970). I work with it every day, all day, and have never experienced any problems. I never shut my VM down, either, except for Windows updates. I suspend it every night and resume it every morning, with no problems.