How secure is the Mac side of my computer to the potential viruses or attacks that may occur on the Windows (virtual machine) side of my Mac? I realize that I'll have anti virus and Win viruses won't actually affect my Mac but I wanted to keep my Mac as clean as possible. I'm a web developer and I've kept a separate computer for running Win so I wouldn't need to have Win on my main workstation. Having Win on my main machine (w/ Parallels) would sure make my work flow more efficient. thanks
personally i don't run any AV software on windows since it's fairly easy to wipe and re-create (or restore from a backup) a VM. if that's not something you're willing to do you can completely isolate windows from your mac in the VM's configuration in the security section. this will make it so that your windows and mac OSes will not be able to interact with each other. however, it's pretty hard to imagine a universal virus so you're pretty safe anyway. fyi, i'm a software developer and have been running this way since parallels first came out. no viruses or issues yet. i still use (on occasion) the XP VM i first created in '06.
Thanks for the reply. I actually have been running XP on a MacBook Pro with Parallels since v3 (currently on 4). That was my way of keeping Win separate from my main workstation. But more and more I'm thinking it would just be easier to have it on my main workstation for easier testing. Thanks again.
