Using a Mac Pro to run multipul OS's?

[MathewJ]

Hi all,

I cant find any documentation that talks about running multipul OS's on Parallels on a new Mac Pro.
At time of writing Apple's high end Mac Pro's have 12 Cores and support upwards of 64GB of Ram.

Currently I have my Macbook Pro running Parallels V5(I think) running Win XP. However when I go to load another guest OS (such as linux, or another Windows). Parallels warns me about performance issues and ignoring those results in the Mac and guest OS's slowing right down.

So my question is: With the high processing power from a mac pro, how many guest OS's can be run without the system crawling to a halt. IE could I run upwards of 3 guest OS's from a Mac Pro?

I dont want to do anything like Windows performace gaming, but using windows for day to day and having a few linux based guest OS's for development would be fantastic.

Thanks
Mathew

 

[engineerbob]

I haven't tried multiple OSs yet, but ...

Hi Mathew,

I am running Parallels 6 with Windows 7 on the MacBook Pro. This computer has 2 core, and it doesn't seem to me to be very powerful. I also have a Mac Pro with 8 core and 20 GB Ram. I have never seen more than about 30% of Ram used - so far. On that computer I run Parallels 6 with Windows XP. One thing to think about is the amount of hard drive that Parallels eats up. I found many files that seem to be backup files of some sort, with file extensions of ".sos" There were quite a few, and the biggest one was over 15 GB! Also, I set my Windows hard drive to be "64 GB, expanding". The result is that Parallels created a virtual hard drive with 128 GB! So if you are planning to have multiple OSs, make sure that you have plenty of hard drive space to support them.

Bob

 

[NotBill]

I regularly run 3 win vms on my mac pro with no problems. yes, you need hdd space for all of them. w2k uses about 11g, xp uses the same and w7 uses a huge 50g. if you have the hdd space, then next you need ram. I have 14g and for me, this works well. I have a mac pro 1,1.