Partial Success Turning 1 mac into 3

[Carpe Meh]

So I've got desks for my kids to my left and right and I would love to setup a Mac Pro with multiple monitors and keyboards so that we could all split one Kick A$$ Mac instead of 3 lesser macs. I'm testing this out with my current mini with two monitors, a trackpad, and a mouse.

That's one mac, running two or three VMs of Mavericks. I have gotten it to work somewhat and it does bog down quite a bit, but it is a 5 yr old mini and the VM file is on a slow hard drive. The activity monitor seems to suggest that the CPU isn't being taxed that much, so I think it is feasible on a Mac Pro with the faster flash.

It works but...

1. The VM is slow although this is expected because my mac is 5 yrs old, the VM is on a slow HD, and I'm low on ram.

2. Due to mission control settings, VMs on external screens will have the Host OS menubar at the top unless you uncheck "Displays will have separate Spaces," but if you do that then you can only have one vm be full screen.

3. Can't seem to find a way to get Bluetooth devices to work exclusively with VM, only to share them with host OS. Might require using USB keyboards and trackpads.

Weird issues

1. The mouse pointer appears to disappear for some weird reason when using USB mouse that is directly connected to the VM (but it does function as a mouse).

2. I can't seem to uninstall parallel tools from the Mavericks VM without it getting stuck at the first step.

Ultimately if I get some indication these weird issues can be resolved then I might go ahead and get a Mac Pro and try this. I'm actually imagining setting it up so that we all work in VMs and we only go into the host OS for hardcore stuff (video editing and other CPU intensive things).

 

[Parallels User]

The most important thing, and of which you make no mention, is RAM, OS X runs smoothly with at least 4 GB, if you are running 3 instances (counting with Host OS) that's at least 12 GB that you need.

Also, you should be aware that there is no graphics hardware acceleration for OS X guests, this means slow graphics and some applications don't work (Pages for instance).

 

[Carpe Meh]

The most important thing, and of which you make no mention, is RAM, OS X runs smoothly with at least 4 GB, if you are running 3 instances (counting with Host OS) that's at least 12 GB that you need.

Also, you should be aware that there is no graphics hardware acceleration for OS X guests, this means slow graphics and some applications don't work (Pages for instance).

Yeah, I'm splitting my 4 gb of ram between host and vm (2 each), so I think that might explain some slowness.

Fixed the missing pointer problem by creating a fresh Mavericks VM and not installing Tools. Also, found that the menubar went away on the second monitor upon a restart.

That said, here is a crazy idea...

What if I use a guest OS to screen share into another user on the Host OS. I presume the User gets all the native hardware acceleration and would share the ram as needed. The guest OS would need barebones ram so long as no other apps were open other than screen sharing. The speed of the VNC graphics would presumably be limited by the speed of the virtual ethernet connection between the host and guest OS which I assume is much faster than real ethernet.

 

[Parallels User]

It's not crazy, and not exactly unheard of either.
You don't need to install a separate VNC app, screen sharing is enough for that. Sound might not work, and it's a setup that globally doesn't use less RAM because the open apps on the Host for other users will consume extra RAM, should globally consume around the same amount.

You should be aware that you might run into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droste_effect which creates an endless loop requiring hard-reset.