Mac Pro and say...two Parallels VMs running at same time

A

austone

Junior Member
If you have a Mac Pro, 4 cores, and you are running two VMs at the same time, do both get to address their own core?

In other words, you would have two cores for Mac OS X, and one Parallels session on the third core, and another, seperate Parallels session on the fourth core?
 
I have a Mac Pro running two VMs. My experience by watching the activity monitor is that the VM workload is distributed across the available processors. Sometimes a compute intensive task will tieup one core for a short period until an interupt or other task demands some processor time and then it switches to any available core. It appears all four cores are available to all VMs.
 
Honestly Hound1, I don't know why it even matters to you :cool:

The Mac Pro is such a beast that if you've got enough RAM it won't even start to sweat ! I've had 3 VMs running in Parallels (XP, Vista, Linux), all with generous RAM allocations, and have not noticed any slow down.

I've noticed a couple of minor things, but hopefully these will be ironed out once RC2 goes gold.

Usual dislaimers apply that it's my own experience, your mileage may differ etc. etc. etc.
 
I concurn with Hound1,

having been running Parallels with 3 VMs (2 Solaris and 1 Windows NT) at the same time for a few days, I can tell that the load is spread on all cores, there is no tie between one VM and a specific core.

All the VMs where quite responsive even with one or two of them under medium load...

I'm starting to be a quite happy camper with the latests releases of Parallels...
Now if only a VM could provide SMP to it's guest OS and if we could have the full functionalities of Compressor to convert VMWare images to Parallels disks...
 
I was just curious how it worked - I had read somebody's comments about wishing for the ability to access two cores with one VM, and it got me thinking kind of about the reverse or a similar situation - about running multiple VMs and how much acess Parallels gets to the hardware, and whether or not you would get into software virtualization if you had too many VMs open versus the number of cores.

I plan on getting a Mac Pro in the near future, and this reinforces my decision :)
 
I can't even run 2 VM's on my Mac Pro 3GB. On the second VM, I get a cannot allocate virtual memory error using 1922.
 
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