Parallels Workstation Quick Review
Its pretty amazing. Download, get the trial key, and use the Wizard to create a virtual machine. Defaults to 8GB for Windows, which does seem sensible. When booting it, there will be an error (doh, Windows isn’t installed); fix this by popping the Windows XP CD into the SuperDrive and it’ll pick it up. Very smart. It takes about 40 minutes to install Windows XP, which does seem rather long.
VM -> Clone VM is something I think is a winner! I just made a pristine Windows XP install and if it needs to get blown away, I’ll have the actual VM image sitting around. However, it seems to have hung when I ran it. Redoing it seems to have made the clone. I can’t reproduce why it hung, however :-(
Another interesting feature is using full-screen guest OSes – the switching is very “fast user switching” like. I’m impressed. However, moving around from full-screen to not, and accidentally hitting the Expose button on the Mighty Mouse, renders all windows to resize in a way it feels like. There’s no defined behavior and its kind of annoying.
Some quick notes:
- Ctrl+Click isn’t right click anymore – its Shift+Ctrl+Click. Seems it conflicts with other applications and is possibly valid in Windows.
- The image format is nice. It doesn’t take 8GB of space up-front, but instead grows space conservatively as and when you use it.
- The .pvs file is a text file, and has a lot of configuration options.
- My network (wireless) beyond having a WEP key also has a MAC address authentication module. It however, by default, conflicts with my MBP’s MAC address when the WinXP guest wants to get access.
