Moving a VM?

A

alonweinstein

Junior Member
Hello.


I'm using Parallels 4 on Leopard on my MacBook. I have several VMs (Windows and Linux, I create a VM for each of my clients to separate things like VPN software installation). Since each Win installation easily takes up 20-30GB (for some reason, not sure why I can't make it smaller... any ideas?) I want to move some of the VMs to an external hard drive. I tried just copying the VM to drive but when I started it Parallels got into an endless "registering vm" message.

Is there a better way to move a VM?


Thanks,
Alon
 
First of all, the Vm indeed should not have such a big size. I suppose the possible reason could be that you are using the plain disk format instead of expanding one. You can check the difference here: http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v4/docs/en/Parallels_Desktop_Users_Guide/22185.htm
Other than that, there could hardly be any other reason of a virtual machine, having only Windows installed, to be of such size. You can try setting up the VM size manually during the creation as well.

As for the main question, it is important to know which version of Parallels do you have. If this is Parallels 4.0 you should be able to move the virtual machine file (/Users/<username>/Documents/Parallels/<VM_name>.pvm) to the external drive and simply doubleclicking on it.
If this is Parallels 3.0 I would suggest to try moving the .hdd file (located in /Users/<username>/Documents/Parallels/<VM_name>/) to the external hard drive and creating a new virtual machine using custom installation mode, specifying that you use "already existing virtual hard disk image" and pointing to the .hdd file that you moved.
 
I have the same question.
I am running Parallels 4.0.3824 and Mac OS 10.6.1.
I have a fully native bootable XP system on an external drive and would like bring it up in parallels.
How may this be done?
 
You can move your Virtual Machine folder to the external hard drive and the use the VM from there.
The default location of the folder is Users -> Library -> Parallels

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