It's way unstable, but it sure is great

Greetings and salutations,

Finally switched to a Macbook Pro after 17 (has it been that long?) years of PC life. The MBP is great, a neato swell machine. I finally switched, because I've seen others in my world using a Mac w/Windows. I've always wanted to run a Mac, but being a Windows weenie, well, you know the story. I waited until now because of Leopard. Ya know, I believed the hype. grins:

Using Virtual machines is not new to me, at least in the Windows world. We've been using VMWare for 3 + years now, love it. We have lots of servers that have 3 servers on 1 machine (we're a computer telephony service bureau). We do lots of heavy duty processing; thousands of calls a day, a few thousand emails a day. We've never had one hiccup with VMWare.

My Virtual life in Mac, which admittedly is only a few days old now, hasn't been near as good.

I'm running Leopard, Vista Ultimate, Parallels 5160. I ordered my MBP the day Leopard came out, it came with the upgrade. I thought of wiping it clean, but then the Leopard upgrade CD wouldn't work, as it needed a previous version of 10X, in order to install. Or at least that's what it said in the packaging. So I popped in the upgrade CD, away I went to get to Leopard.

I downloaded and installed 5160. Installing it didn't go so good. It seemed to hang, but that could have been because I'm a 10X newbie. It finally installed.

Installing Vista didn't go well either. It blue screened (I thought my NT days were over) a few times. I had to boot up in Safe mode. Once I booted up in Safe mode, then restarted, I got Vista to load.

Since then (3 days ago), Parallels crashes -- a few times a day. My latest issue is when attaching a removable USB drive, a FreeAgent Pro. I'll attach the drive, it sees files on it fine. But after an hour or so, it blue screens. It restarts, but not until 2 or 3 cycles of blue screens; then the old DOS screen, prompting me how to start Windows.

When Parallels starts I usually get an error others seem to get; "Timed out waiting for the file system to initialize. The volume has been ejected..."

Other times Parallels just crashes for no particular reason. I left for lunch the other day, put the machine to sleep. Came back, Parallels was blue screened.

I'm using Time Machine, I'm not backing up Time Machine. I use another FreeAgent Pro drive in my office for Time Machine.

2 out of 3 times I can shut down Parallels fine, using the normal Windows shut down. The Parallels help docs say the best way to shut down the Virtual OS is to use Windows shut-down, so that's what I do. But other times Parallels hangs when I shut it down; to get it to stop I need to use Force Quit. Then when I restart, it's usually not a clean restart; a few blue screens, then the DOS screen prompting me how to start Windows. I always choose "Start Normally", to load Windows.

A few other little problems not worth mentioning here.

I love my MBP, it's a great machine (but it does seem to run hot). The idea of using 2 (who knows? I may get real nerdie, try loading 3 OS's -- Linux) OS's on a laptop is great.

But this stuff makes NT 4.0 look really stable. grins:

Nothing against the folks at Parallels, but I didn't expect this much trouble. I read all the forums for a couple of months in advance, noticed some real nightmares. But I just figured it wouldn't happen to me. Then like I say, we've been running VMWare for a few years now, no problemos. The idea of virtual operating systems is not exactly cutting edge anymore. I figured since I was running such a basic config, I should be home free.

So what's the deal? Why is this so unstable? Are my troubles largely related to everything being so new? Leopard + Beta Parallels + Vista Ultimate?

I see Apple is working hard on a 10.5.1 patch. I've been reading other forums, others are having some of my same troubles such as networking snafus.

I've been reading the forums here, others are having issues too. It looks like there's a Parallels release in the works that'll officially support Leopard. Soon I hope? If so, that...should help.

Right? Please say yes. grins:

Anyway, I'll give a call to tech support on Monday, see if there's anything they can do to help me get things more stable. If anyone out there reads this gibberish and has anything to offer in the mean time, moocho gracias in advance.

Thanks in advance, looking forward to joining the hip, Mac crowd. Maybe I'll even start wearing black t-shirts all the time. grins:

 

HoleInTheSky,

Bingo. You hit the nail on the head. Leopard is not fully stable with Parallels, and they have never pretended it.

Downgrade to X.4, your life will be a lot better. I have three nines of uptime on an OS X server virtualizing MS SQL Server with Parallels.

 

I, too, am a long-time lost soul that finally found the truth and recently bought a Mac Pro. Unfortunately, I'm having the same kind of trouble you are, and much more.

To alleviate the never-ending-shut-down problem you're having, I disable sharing the VM folder to Mac.

 

One thing that's helped (or seems to anyway) is to install the latest macfuse 10.5-1.1.1 http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

Since installing it I haven't crashed in like 12 hours, a record.

I'll try disabling the share, report back if that helps or not.

Another weird thing I found is that Parallels assigns it's own range of IP addresses - 10.0.211.xxx - to the Windows side. When I tried to setup a VPN to my servers I couldn't, because Vista complained it wasn't connected (because of the funky IP addresses). I'm not sure what I did to correct this, I think it just changed after a while to my normal range of IP addresses (10.0.1.xxx).

I thought this was supposed to be easy? grins: Aren't Mac's supposed to be easier than PC's? grins:

 

I guess that its easy if you stay within the Mac realm. I have not found it easier. I am, nevertheless, reserving judgment until I have had a chance to work with it for a little longer; it's only been 7 weeks.

I'm a .NET developer who's eight-year-old PC recently died and opted to go the Mac route. I've had a myriad of hardware and software problems, to the point that apple has even refunded part of the cost of my mac pro and sent me a free copy of leopard.

I hopeful that some of the parallel problem get resolved soon cuz I need to get productive on my windows work. Just in case, as I received notification of your reply, I was looking at VMWare's Fusion product. Do you know anything good or bad about it?

BTW, I don't want to give the impression that I'm not happy with my Mac, I am, but it was not what I expected, exactly. I expected to have less problems than with a new windows-only machine.

 

Good morning Westeban,

We've used VMWare (Fusion makers) since it became available on our servers. Never had one problem. It runs just like it's on it's own box. I was going with Fusion, but a guy in my office uses Parallels. But he's using XP Pro, and doesn't do any heavy lifting with it. He complies on his Windows machine. So I figured I'd give Parallels a try, since I had "tech support" in my office. So far, well, I need to give it more time before I pass judgment. But I will say I wouldn't call this beta software. I'd call it alpha, at best.

Like the networking issues. WTF are these guys thinking? Every Windows network in the world uses 10.0.0.0 subnet address formats. It's like they're not using Windows or something. I don't get it. I just hope it gets better. I've lost a bunch of time on this.

I'm a .NET developer too. I haven't loaded Visual Studio on my Macbook Pro, because I simply have no confidence. I gotta make some money! I can't spend my day, dinking around with my OS. So, I'm still using two computers.

I'm with you. In general, I love my MBP. But like you say, I just had way higher expectations. Have you read the bug fixes coming for 10.5? Wow, those are a lot of fixes. Microsoft would take a beating if they released on OS that needed that many fixes.

So far, my opinion is that this whole notion that Windows and Macs play together nice is way over hyped.

Anyway, I don't want to take up space here whining.

 

Exactly. Since you're new to Macs you really can't be expected to know this, but any Mac OS release that is 10.X.0 will almost certainly give you trouble because there is almost no software that is 100% compatible with it and as a .0 release there are still lots of bugs. Unfortunately Apple starts shipping new Macs with only the newer OS rather quickly so there is almost no way to avoid this if you get a Mac immediately after a 10.X.0 release. However, Mac OS developers recognize that this is a problem, and most of them offer betas that are compatible with the new OS. There isn't in fact ANY virtualization software that is fully Leopard compatible and not in beta at the moment (that includes VMWare Fusion; the Leopard compatible version of it is also a beta).

I occasionally get kernel panics when I have a lot of network connections open, so yes, this is a big problem and I am anxiously awaiting the 10.5.1 update in hopes that it will fix these problems. A 10.5.1 beta has already been seeded to developers so it should be released soon.

There is a Leopard compatible beta version of Parallels available, it was released 4 days (or 2 business days) after Leopard was. You can read about it here, or download it here. If you have any difficulties with it then please check the beta forum and if you don't find a solution to your problem there then write a post about it so the Parallels developers know what they need to fix.