We have Parallels setup on one Mac as a station for our web department to test out site development in various browsers. The Mac is running OS X 10.7.4 with Parallels 7.0.15098 on a Mac Pro (original) 2x2.66 GHz dual-core Intel Xeon with 20G RAM. I shut all the OSes (2x Windows 7, 1x Windows Vista, 3x Windows XP) down once a week and reboot the computer to defrag memory, and once a month I take Parallels down so I can backup all the .pvm files to an external USB drive just as an emergency backup in case the Mac Pro's hard drive goes bad someday -- we don't have any critical data on the Windows OSes, so this just saves me having to rebuild all six Windows environments by hand. Anyway, specs aside, here's my two issues. 1. Even though I have "automatically compress virtual disks" enabled for each Windows OS, I'm still finding that once a month I have to manually compress each disk to reclaim wasted space. Here's a log of my space usage from last month (numbers after each OS are space used before and after compression): W7-IE9 15.9 15.2 W7-IE8 18 17.1 XP-IE8 14.9 11.8 XP-IE7 13.4 11.6 XP-IE6 13.2 12.1 TOTALS 75.4 67.8 That's about 7.6G saved -- not terrible, but not negligible either. Not sure why the disks are not compressing themselves as requested. 2. I don't have a problem with compressing them once a month to reclaim lost space -- it's pretty easy. But one thing that would make it easier is if there was a command to compress all inactive virtual disks. Right now, I have to open each OS window, manually queue a compression, then go do something else for a few minutes before it's ready for me to queue compression on the next OS. If I could just hit a "compress all" command and come back after lunch, that'd be much easier. Any chance that could get implemented in a future Parallels update (or is it in there now and I just don't know it)?
