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Parallels Desktop for OS X Reviewed
phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica has put up a great review of the first full release of Parallels' virtualization software for OS X, Parallels Desktop 1.0. From the article: 'Move over emulation, virtualization is in and it's hotter than two Jessica Albas wresting the devil himself in a pit of molten steel. It's no contest, virtualization has it all: multiple operating systems running on the same machine at nearly the full speed of the host's processor with each system seamlessly networking with the next. Add to that the fact that it's cheaper than getting a new machine and you have the guaranteed latest craze. Not even the Hula Hoop can stop this one.'"
Well, maybe people are reading the full arti...oh, right, Slashdot. Never mind.
So Taco, when did Harry Knowles join the editorial staff?
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
The promise of the HURD microkernel with OS 'personalities' is coming to our desktops in a slightly updated fashion. But I still love the idea as long as my Linux and Windows can run beside each other and behave, it makes development much nicer.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
"..and it's hotter than two Jessica Albas wresting the devil himself in a pit of molten steel. It's no contest, virtualization has it all.."
Umm i hate to be the one pointing this out, but i for one can think of some very hot things about Jessica Albas that virtualization doesn't have.
Really.., can't compare
Here's a reprint from my Slashdot journal
Yes, I am joking. Parallels is awesome. The claims of "near native performance" are indeed correct - in my experience. Parallels is what allowed me to finally make the 'switch' because my office is tied heavily to Outlook (and Business Contact Manager and therefore SQL Server).
Parallels works as advertised and is recommended from one slashdotter to another.
My only pet peeve is the way that the virtual machine mount USB drives only allows 1 OS to have access to the device at a time. So if you are on the Windows side and insert a drive, Mac does not see it, and vice versa. I am not sure if there is a way around that or not. But that really is the only annoyance that prevents me for managing the this seamlessly.
I hate sounding like such a fanboy, but this really is a great piece of software.
on my Gateway laptop and when combined with OSX, its pretty damn slick. If you plan on playing games or video, you should forget about it and just use Boot Camp, but if you're not using very demanding apps, its a godsend. AutoCAD runs really well, and its nice not having to reboot. If you are contemplating a virtualization app, be aware that you will need memory for both operating systems. 512 is painful, 1 gb can get slow at times, and 2gb is the sweet spot. If you are going to virtualize XP, try SP1 instead of 2. SP2 is a lot slower in virtualization (this was the case when using Virtual PC or VMWare).
I bought a MacBook Pro recently, with the intention of having a single machine for home (OS X) and office (WinXP). I tried out Parallels and there's no doubt that it is a very useful piece of software. Waving my hand over my Macbook (accomplished with Shadowbook + Virtuedesktops), caused my screen to rotate into either Windows XP or OS X at will. The processor speed, because the Core Duo is simply being virtualized, is pretty much full speed. On the other hand, the Mobility Radeon X1600 GPU (with its 256MB of VRAM goodness) cannot be virtualized, so Parallels must emulate an 8meg SVGA card. This makes the graphics of Windows XP seem sluggish. Since I am transitioning from a 4-year old Dell Inspiron that is very peppy and snappy in the GPU department, I refused to tolerate any sluggishness whatsoever in my new ($2K+) computer. I installed Boot Camp yesterday and then installed Windows XP. After you install the Apple-provided drivers for the MacBook (including Radeon drivers), the system runs incredibly smooth under XP. The only special thing I had to do was install Windows 2003 Server Resource Kit (free from MS) to re-map my right Command key as a delete key so that I could use ctl-alt-delete to login to my domain.
If you need to use Windows XP all day as your work OS (as I do), you will find Boot Camp to be the superior solution, if only for the snappiness of the system. I don't need to use OS X at work for any reason, so dual-booting works for me. If you only use a few Windows apps irregularly and will primarily use OS X all day, then Parallels is the way to go. Keep in mind that Boot Camp is free, while Parallels costs $.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
wake me up when someone runs windows seamlessly on a stock PC.
Vista?
I mean, it doesn't do a video card, and apparently even the lowest Vista settings need a video card (at least 64MB VRAM, right?). OR do I misunderstand things?
So Intel can finally do what IBM developed back in the 1960's. LPAR anyone?
They did address the games issue in the article. It was 'don't bother'. He even had the tongue in cheek estimate of a 3dmark score of -30000.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Like Baldur's Gate, or Icewind Dale, or Planescape (Any Bioware Infinity Engine Titles really). How do games of this nature run under Parallels? Is DirectX handled acceptably for everything other than 3D acceleration? If so, I'll probably have to speed up my plans to upgrade to an Intel based Mac. I'm a recent switcher, and this is the only thing that's been really hurting me. I use my Gamecube for new games, but to relive older titles it would be awesome if parallels would fill the gap.
this is exactly what the tagging system is here for, folks. Two weeks from now when you wonder "what was that thing? About wrestling? I think it was with the devil? Or maybe devils?" slashdot tagging beta will be there to bail you out.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Anybody care to summarize the pros and cons of Parallels vs VMWare?
The latter is vaporware on OS.X.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
It uses a different codebase and it runs on a Mac? Just guessing.
Breakfast served all day!
www.osx86project.org.
2005 called and wants their joke back.
Seriously though, people have been doing it since the first verrsion of 10.4 x86 was released to developers.
-Ed
So you see what had happened was....
I do definitely think this is cool, but I think the next logical step... and I know this would be very tricky... would be to figure out how to run programs in the Parallels operating system in a sort of "rootless" windowed way. I guess this would be pretty much impossible without modifying the hosted operating system, but if it could be figured out, it would be fantastic. Imagine having Windows windows and Gnome windows running on top of OS X seemlessly, without seeing their respective desktop backgrounds.
I suppose you could do this with X by using SSH into the hosted *nix system and running OSX's X server, but I don't see how it could be done with Windows...
One thing that bugs me is tht you have to carve out a dedicated amount of RAM to each guest OS, even if you aren't using all of it. Since I don't intend to do much with XP I've been able to get by by dedicating only 128MB out of the 1GB on my Mac Mini. I wish there was a way for both OSes to see my 1GB of RAM and use only what's needed, but I guess the OS would need Xen-like additions, no?
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
As someone with an existing install of XP (Bootcamp), it seems like a shame to have to two copies of windows to be able to dual boot (primarily for games).
-c
"If you are an idealist it doesn't matter what you do or what goes on around you, because it isn't real anyway."-R.P.W.
Sorry, but by definition nothing can be hotter than virtualization as any powerful enough virtualization system can allow you to have N simultaneous copies of the thing you are claiming is hotter.
Thus a proper virtualization system would allow you to have two simultaneous Jessica Albas, which I think was being hinted at in the "wrestling the devil" portion of the post. The devil I guess was a methaphor for memory consumption, while the molten steel plainly referred to the processor load and resulting core temperatures.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Parallels runs Ubuntu with no problems whatsoever. I use Ubuntu 6.06 on my MacBook Pro as my work development environment, and in general it is faster than my 2.6GHz desktop.
I wish the X-server had better "change resolutions on the fly" capabilities (to handle going from full-screen to windowed mode), but I usually end up just displaying xterms from the Ubuntu virtual machine on my Mac OS X desktop anyway.
I fail to see the problem since if you want to run games you simply use Bootcamp instead.
In fact that gives you a better setup since you have what is essentially a dedicated system for gaming that can be tweaked out and then a seperate windows system setup for productivity apps that you don't optmiize nearly so much. It's the ultimate setup because a rogue game (or more like a rogue game deinstaller) cannot then wipe out your REAL data.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
-b.
Of course it's hard to imagine MS and Linus agreeing on such an API. But this isn't a zero sum game. People might choose to install Windows because with virtualization they know they will still be able to run Linux easily. Bill Gates will still have sold you a Windows license even though you're spending most of your time running Linux. So it's in the interest of MS and Linux to figure out how to interoperate between virtual machines.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
-b.
I don't know about any of those titles, but StarCraft runs reasonably well, except for occasional problems with the sound cutting out.
In general, anything that doesn't require any hardware accelerated graphics should run fine, so games that have a software rendering option should be playable under Parallels. However, YMMV.
I'm playing Planescape:Torment under parallels on my iMac. Works great. You'll have to fiddle with the graphic settings in the VM to allow it to change resolutions if you want to run it in its fullscreen glory. The speed is quite acceptable. There are a few graphical "turdlets" when you are moving the mouse around, but these are easily ignored (at least for me).
I have. They appear to be fairly equivalent, as far as I can tell. I run SuSE 10 at the office, but I am required to run a few windows-only applcations. I have been using various versions of VMWare for the past 4 years to get around that barrier. I downloaded a trial version of Parallels to see what it was like. I was initially interested because VMWare has been fairly expensive to re-purchase over the years, and Parallels is quite inexpensive by comparison.
Both install via RPM and the install is pretty straightforward. I did not find Parallels difficult to configure, but then I have been using VMWare for some time, and I am familiar with the concepts and what needs to be done. The Parallels interface is quite similar to VMWare's, so if you are familiar with one product, you should be able to use the other. In the past, I learned the hard way that VMWare was a fairly memory-intensive application. Once I added an extra gig of RAM to my workstation everything ran pretty smoothly. I don't know if Parallels runs well with less RAM or not, but I would assume that more memory is always better. I have an Athlon 1700 CPU, and it can run multiple Linux applications and a virtual windows session without tons of paging or lag.
Mind you, I only boot the windows VM once a week or so, and run it for maybe 15-20 minutes at a time. If you wanted to run something more intensive, YMMV. I have not tried to run any games via VMWare either, so I have no idea what that would be like. On the whole, I am pleased to say that both Parallels and VMWare both work really well for me. They offer similar performance and functionality, and both are quite stable applications. The next time VMWare rolls out an upgrade that I have to pay for, I will be switching to Parallels.
As other posters have stated, games are probably the holy grail of windows virtualization. I would like nothing better to have an Intel-based PowerMac with a kick-ass graphics card that could give me all the benefits of owning a Mac, with the added bonus of being able to play my favourite games without rebooting.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Its potential for creating a dramatic increase in Mac converts should not be overlooked. To the point, I have a particular user (a CFO of a medium-sized manufacturing company) who spends most of her day working Excel spreadsheets, creating documents, emails and using a browser (webforms, webapps, browsing). It was a constant battle to keep her PC clean of virii and spyware. A perfect candidate for switching to a Mac, except for their base accounting system, which will only run in Windows. I got her a new Mac Mini Dlx, installed and configured Parallels with WinXP Pro and she could not be happier. She's running Mac:MS Office for Word, Entourage and Excel, uses Safari/FireFox for browsers (some of her sites won't behave on one or the other) and bounces into the other PCs on the network with COTVNC. And just a note to the non-consultant folks out there... It's always a very good thing to make the CFO happy.
One of the things I like most about Parallels is their "don't let Windows out of the box" approach. Coupled with an (admittedly similar to MS VPC) easy to backup set of files, should anything go wonky with the Windows install, it's a 2 minute job to restore it completely.
I can see this becoming a much more viable alternative to computer-savvy management level types.
I just got my MB last week and tried Parallels this weekend. I'll definitely be buying it before the price goes up on the 15th. (From $50 to $80.)
I couldn't get W2K installed* but XP went on fine, as did RedHat 7.1. Ubuntu goes on next, followed by SmackBook.
Slower than native (AFAIK, all of Parallels runs as one thread) but still fun and very useful for what I need it for.** Each OS picks up another address on your LAN (192.168.1.105, 106, 107, etc.) and it's a lot of fun to SSH to a virtual Linux box, make a page in ~/public_html/, and view it in Safari on the same box.
XP runs fine fullscreen (1280x800) and if you have your Mac set up to right-click with the trackpad, you don't need to do anything different in Windows--a quick one-two on the trackpad and I've got a contextual menu in XP. Scrolling also works. 'Command' maps to 'Windows key' just like when you use a Mac keyboard on a regular PC, so that also behaves as expected. Overall, it's great. Definitely fast enough to be useful--it's not like I'm on a 200 MHz machine all of a sudden or anything. Feels like any reasonably peppy Windows box.
* doubly funny because that's the OS they show in the screenshots in the documentation) because no matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to see the CD--it just keeps saying "No boot device available, press Enter to continue."
** handy way to have lots of OSs with me, do testing, troubleshooting, etc. And FreeCell. There's still nothing better than Windows' FreeCell.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I installed Parallels on an Intel iMac recently. I created virtual machines with Ubuntu, Fedora Core, and FreeDOS (no reason, just because I can). All of them seem to work fine, except FreeDOS, but then in my experience DOS never worked well on my parents' Tandy either.
I installed Windows XP today and everything seems just fine and peppy. The IT guy who installed it commented that the installation took less time than on some of the Dells he worked with. My favorite part is the backup mechanism - I now have a fresh, no-spyware installation of Windows XP with Matlab, SPSS, and Access all installed. All of my documents will be stored on a Mac hard disk by a shared folder. So I went to the Finder and made a copy of the disk image, and when I want to revert to a fresh image, all I do is delete the working hard drive, and rename "image copy" to "image" and I'm back as good as new. 8)
I have one question for the forum - like many others, I wish there was native hardware acceleration. Wouldn't it be feasible by installing a Windows graphics driver that sends the hardware calls to Parallels, which then uses Mac native OpenGL to do hardware rendering? It doesn't seem that different from ordinary rendering in a window. This could be straightforward for PC OpenGL games, and for the DirectX games, perhaps the calls can be mapped to OpenGL functions. Perhaps with a speed penalty, but it should almost certainly be better than software rendering. You folks who know more about graphics rendering than I do - might this be possible?
Virtualization is better than dual-booting, but you still get all the natural disadvantages that come with WinXP. To wit: high price tag, vulnerability to malware, and bad karma from supporting the Evil Empire. There are a very small number of Windows programs that I would like to run, but this price is just too high. WINE and Crossover Office represent my real hope for the future.
I'd be interested to see a few benchmarks on this one. eg. Photoshop transforms on Windows under Parallels vs the same on OS X Power PC binaries under Rosetta
My best guess would be that the Windows version would be faster because despite the virtualisation layer, it's still an x86 binary. Might make for some painful choices until Adobe can complete their glacial move to universal binaries.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
Intel VT is codenamed vanderpool, here's a link to a pdf with a list of which processors have it. It's mainly the core duo's, and some of the pentium D and EE 9xx series. Core 2 Duo's will also support it.
AMD's VT is codenamed pacifica, and as far as I know, no processors have actually launched with it yet, though it's due soon. I stand to be corrected on that point, all AMD's articles press releases say yet is 'due first half 2006'
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.