Parallels 8 on Mac OS X with 16GB of RAM

Hi,

I'm running Parallels Desktop 8 on my Mac Mini (Mid 2011) with 16GB of RAM.
I've created a Windows 7 VM and assigned 10GB to it.

Everything works very well except suspending the VM. Sometimes when I suspend it either while suspending or while resuming Parallels shows an error (Problem ID 44) and is unable to save/restore the VM. Of course I've already contacted support with this issue. The only thing they did was take control over my machine (using LogMeIn) and delete the .mem file. This of course deleted everything in the memory dump that was not saved to HDD with it (not cool!). There should be at least 2 reports associated to my account that I've sent when this happened. My guess is that 10GB are too much for Parallels to dump them to the HDD. As stated above it only happens sometimes. I guess this is if a certain threshold of memory usage is reached.

Could someone at Parallels please look into this Issue. It is really annoying to work with a VM which can't be suspended.

An easy test scenario would be to set up a VM on a Mac (preferably MacMini) and assign 10GB as well. Then start 5 instances of for example Visual Studio (which should allocate more than enough memory) and try to suspend it.

Thanks in advance!

 

@Parallels Support: Anyone reading this?

 

Have you ran any hardware tests on the RAM? It's possible one of the modules is corrupted.

 

Yes, the memory was checked with memtest. Besides that I've never had any Problems running the VM or any other memory intensive application. It must have to do with how Parallels Desktop 8 saves/restores a VM.

 

The limit is physical, not likely in Parallels, prior to the latest version Parallels limited the the RAM for each VM to 8 GB, not anymore.

I assume there's enough disk space, and there's no problem with the disk...

Also, when resuming there should be 10 GB of free RAM available.

 

I'm running a 600GB Intel SSD with more than 300GB free space. What do you mean with "The limit is physical"?

 

Physical: Possible not sufficient free disk space (not the problem apparently), Possible not sufficient free RAM when resuming.

 

Yes I also thought about that. I verified that it also crashes when I have 12 GB of memory free. Besides: Is Parallels Desktop 8 not using dynamic memory allocation (in most cases I try to suspend with about 5-8 GB memory usage)? And how come that it crashes sometimes while suspending the VM which should have nothing to do with the amount RAM available, right?

 

Did you have a chance to reproduce the problem yet?

 

Me? I don't work for Parallels.
I'm a Product Expert, not Parallels Support.

 

I see.

Is there anyone from Parallels reading this?!?

 

Can you reproduce this error again then submit a Problem Report (via Parallels Help menu > Report a problem) and post report ID here? The report contains diagnostic information that helps us understand what went wrong.