Parallels in a corporate environment?

D

dangcookie

Member
I just accepted a job where PC's running XP Pro are the norm. I've managed to talk them into letting me use my MacBook instead of being confined to a PC desktop. But before I shoot myself in the foot with all of this, I thought I would confirm with those of you who are using Parallels in a corporate environment that all is well there. In other words, is all networking functionality of XP Pro fully functional? I'll want to use XP's VPN to access the corporate network from home. Those kinds of things. Otherwise, I intend to work with the Adobe suite in OS X, Office 2007 in OS X, etc.. I'll need to use Windows for certain (like I said) "corporate" things. I apologize for the overall vagueness of my question, since I don't have the experience to anticipate potential problems, and I suspect some of you have made the transition and might have advice for me.

One last note: a good friend of mine happens to be the person in charge of all hardware and networking in the building, and it was with his blessing that I have been allowed to introduce my MacBook to their system. If you happen to have corporate-networking-related pointers that I can pass on to him in regard to installation, configuration, etc., I would greatly appreciate it.

Big thanks,
David
 
I'm in a similar boat - testing out a MBP in an all windows client shop due to having parallels to fall back on, and it's been working fine for me now.

You can VPN within OS X or Windows fine, connect to shared drives, etc. You can even add your Parallels partition onto the domain so you get all the policy and AD pushes (nice to get easy access to shared drives, printers, etc) if it makes work feel better - it should be just like running a company machine.

You're better off running Office 2003/2007 in XP/Vista - I'm personally not happy with running Office through rosetta on my mac (non UB until Office 2008 comes out soonish). Everything else you should be able to do within OS X. Some people are happy with Entourage but having an actual copy of Outlook is generally preferred.

OS X afaik itself has somewhat limited AD support, but it is there though they need to install Macintosh Services on their admin servers.
 
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Deciding between boot camp vs. Parallels virtual machine

So...
I'm reading through the Parallels manual as I wait for my new, larger notebook hard drive to arrive in the mail. I've got to get my head inside this new paradigm!

I'm starting to wrap my head around how Parallels works and the concept of virtual machines, but the documentation could in fact be a little more explicit for newbies in regard to the pro's and cons of using Boot Camp with Parallels. i.e., are there cons? It seems like the wise choice is to go with Boot Camp, thereby allowing me to boot into Windows. But the installation instructions are not entirely clear to me. Do I download Boot Camp, then load it and Windows XP, then install Parallels and do the Custom install with the "Use Boot Camp" option? Also, do I use more disk space if I go the Boot Camp route? i.e., how does Parallels create a virtual machine for the Windows XP partition after the fact? Does it end up copying a bunch of files into its viritual machine directory structure?

Next question:
When I allocate memory for my virtual machine, does my virtual machine necessarily claim all this memory when running? Or does it dynamically take RAM as needed up to the amount that I allocate in Config? FYI: I'm installing 2GB of RAM in my MacBook, and will be running PhotoShop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Office for Mac. I'm thinking of allocating 768MB for the Windows XP virtual machine.

Sorry, but this is a bit nebulous to me at the moment. I didn't realize just how much there is to learn when moving to a virtual OS environment.

David
 
I use Parallels in our office and everything works just fine.

As for BootCamp, it is a nice 'fall-back' if Parallels goes bonkers, also if you have periodic use of hardware that doesn't work in Parallels. There are a couple files that Parallels creates (typically the same place where the config is) and the rest is stored on the partition.

Give it the memory you want it to claim... 768 MB is typically a sweet spot for 2 GB of memory and is what we set our computers to here.

Hope that helps.
 
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