How many instances of parallels have people managed to get running. On a MacBook Pro with 3 GB of RAM, having a FreeBSD and a Windows XP session brings the machine to a crawl, though I have managed to eek in a third one. On a Mac Pro with 16 GB of RAM and 4 cores I can get 5 going, but when I try to add a 6th, I get very strange failures that are very ungraceful. Sometimes when I boot the sixth up and try an install of an OS, it fails randomly (when I have done the exact same install on VM #4 and it works). Other times it crashes and says report this to parallels. Most often it actually crashes the WindowServer process and causes the entire GUI to lock. What have you experienced when you try to run many instances of Parallels on the same Mac?
Hello Simonlok, These issues might be concerned with lack of memory. Please check how much memory is allocated to Parallels (in PD Preferences, Memory tab) and what is each of your VM's RAM (see in Configuration Editor, Memory section). Best regards, Xenos
I've got about 13 GB allocated to Parallels (via the Preferences menu item). The total amount of memory I've got on the VMs is just around 6 GB (4 x 512MB + 1024GB + 2048GB)... so I don't think that's the problem. The way it's going down is very ungraceful... it's not like the Parallels app is saying it's out of memory, one instance just crashes hard. The other instances tend to continue to run, but sometimes it crashes the WindowServer.app. If you leave the machine with WindowServer.app in a bad state for more than a few hours, the entire Mac Pro becomes unresponsive. I have no other applications running on the Mac Pro, just five or six VMs. Are there any logs that I can look at to see what's going on?
Simonlok, the issues might be concerned with the limit of time: all the VMs you launch are addressing to the only Mac hard drive and they can not get all the information they need at once. For me problems start when I launch just two VMs but I have only 1.25 GB of RAM on my MAC. I am trying to use my VMs in turn. Best regards, Xenos
