CPU/RAM to run guest OS optimally

I'm pretty new to virtualisation and I just upgraded from my trial of Parallels on my late 2008 Unibody MacBook so I could install Win8 Pro.

My MacBook has a dual-core CPU, 4Gb RAM (upgraded from 2Gb recently) and nVidia Geforce 9400 GPU with 256Mb RAM. My main use for Parallels will be to run Visual Studio - I am developing cross-platform software for Win/Mac/iPad. My software involves 3D rendering using DirectX and I chose Parallels over VirtualBox because I was so impressed how well it ran my app.

Anyway, when I'm using my Mac in Windows mode I'd like it to run as smoothly as possible. Parallels suggested I give the VM 1 CPU core and 1Gb of RAM. Itreally didn't want to go above 1536Mb, in fact it asked be 2-3 times if I was sure when I set it to 2Gb. But since the MacBook only used to have 2Gb and worked fine, I figured this would be fine... am I right or are there problems here I am not understanding?
What about cores... is it safe for the VM to be allowed both cores? For compiling code this would speed things up quite a lot.

There's probably a guide to this stuff but I didn't see one in the sticky links... sorry if this is the 99th time this month it's been asked!

 

Hi jdxjohn,

I looked up this article about RAM for you: http://kb.parallels.com/en/113649 and a video http://kb.parallels.com/en/114732
Also you shouldn't assign all your cores to the vm. This will slow down the mac.

 

If I have Core 2 Duo with just 2 cores, should I assign both of them to the VM, so that I can play games, or it's better to have 1 for Mac and 1 for Windows?

 

Thanks!

What if I want my VM to have priority i.e. I switch to working on Windows only for a few hours and don't want to use any Mac apps... is assigning both cores better for Windows or will it hurt parallels and therefore make everything slower?

 

Hi,

Additional information about CPU and performance: http://kb.parallels.com/en/115645

Just remember that Parallels is a program running on your mac, so there for you have to assign some resources to the mac.