Best practices for web dev on new MacBook Air w/Yosemite in VM

I just bought Parallels 10 and think I want to use it this way. Please tell me if I'm misguided.
My last Air had all kinds of weird battery drain issues that Apple tech support could not address properly. I don't want that to happen again, so it seems like controlled experiments are in order. This time it seems to me that if I create a few different Yosemite images (one with Dropbox, one without; one with Chrome, one without, for example), I can track down what happened.

Is this a good way to make use of Parallels? Does Yosemite work close to its non-VM speed on a recent Mac with the following specs?

MacBook Air (11-inch, Early 2014) purchased January 2015
OSX Yosemite 10.10.1
1.4 GHz Intel Core i5
8 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD

Thanks!

 

Surely this is the easiest question ever asked on these forums? Can you run Yosemite on Yosemite efficiently on a late-model MacBook Air? Not even a handy RTFM link?

Chirp, chirp...


Glad I paid for this software. Because, you know, better support than freeware. Right...?

 

Hi Tom,
Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac is designed to work with OS X 10.10 Yosemite.
You will be able to run OS X 10.10 Yosemite as a guest operating system on your Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac.
The system requirements of Parallels Desktop 10 is available at : http://kb.parallels.com/122662
With the above mentioned system configuration, you will be able to use Parallels Desktop in your Mac without any issues.
To install OS X as a Virtual Machine, please visit page no : 133 at our User Guide
http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v10/docs/en_US/Parallels Desktop User's Guide.pdf
To create multiple Virtual Machine's, please open Parallels Desktop and choose : File -> New
Feel free to reach us if you have any additional questions.