CPU/RAM to run guest OS optimally

J

jdxjohn

Member
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!
 
kat said:
Also you shouldn't assign all your cores to the vm. This will slow down the mac.
Click to expand...

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?
 
kat said:
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.

:)
Click to expand...
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?
 
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