Multiple VMs - not concurrently running

Hi Everyone,

Sorry if this has been asked, but I searched and haven't found a similar thread. I hope this is the right forum, as it pertains to both PD installation issues and Windows configurations.

I have an early 15" MBP 1.83 GHz Core Duo with 2GB RAM, and I've just ordered an internal, 160GB 7200RPM HD upgrade for it. When I get it, I want to do the following:

Current VMs:
No Boot Camp partition
WinXP.hdd - (growable, currently 9GB) on internal HD with Office 2002 (excellent performance)
WinVistaUlt.hdd - (growable, currently 16GB) on external HD with Office 2007 (acceptable performance, but typical issues noted in these forums)

New VMs:
15 GB Boot Camp partition with WinVista Ultimate and Office 2007 Pro - (for testing and demonstration only, never to be opened in PD 3.0)
Existing WinXP.hdd on internal HD with Office 2002 Pro (production use of MS Access apps)
New WinXP.hdd on internal HD with Office 2007 Pro (testing of MS Access apps)
Existing WinVista.hdd on external HD with Office 2007 Pro (testing and future production use of MS Access apps)
The internaland external .hdd files will be duplicated on external HDs, and should run from either the internal or any external HD.

My questions are:
1. What is the minimum Boot Camp partition size for running Vista and Office 2007 Pro? I know it will fit in 15GB and I will never use it for data storage. Can it be smaller?
2. Can I have my copy of Vista Ultimate on both a PD 3.0 .hdd (now activated and running) AND on a Boot Camp partition? I do not intend to ever run the Boot Camp version of Vista in PD, and would certainly never run them at the same time. Will re-activating Vista in Boot Camp de-activate it in PD 3.0?

Thanks for reading this far!

 

Well, you should be able to get the BootCamp partition pretty much as small as you want through the BootCamp Set-up Assistant.

You probably need to tie BootCamp and Parallels together to do the latter.