I got a new work laptop – 13″ Macbook Pro. I’ve also recently purchased Parallels 4, and I’ve been playing around ways to stay in Mac OS as much as possible while developing within Visual Studio. Thus far I haven’t found a way to tweak performance of Windows via Parallels to be anywhere near Windows via Bootcamp, but I’ll keep trying.
There is a separate problem, however, that Parallels has already provided me with a viable solution for: Preserving a machine’s state, specifically what has been installed. At my work we’re currently fighting problems with the drivers for our hardware, and the buggy driver state is both difficult to reach (it seems to occur at random, with one exception) and impossible to return to (i.e. once the driver bug is fixed we can’t reverse our steps to get back to the buggy state). The exception in reproducing this bug is that it always occurs on a clean Windows install. Parallels will help with these problems in two ways:
- Create a backup of a clean install. Over the past few hours I create an XP Parallels VM and a Vista Parallels VM. Both have nothing more than Windows Updates installed on them. Using Parallel’s variable-sized hard disk, the two VMs take up a very reasonable 10 GB.
- When I produce the buggy driver state within one of the VMs, I need only make a copy of the VM and I have a permanent record that can be tested against once a fix has been submitted.
So, how simple is it to ‘copy’ a virtual machine? Well, if you only plan on using it on the same computer as it was created it’s as simple as copying the ‘.pvm’ bundle in ‘~/Documents/Parallels/’ folder (your installation may be ‘Library’ instead of ‘Documents’). If you’re planning on using the VM on a different machine it’s not quite as simple, but still pretty easy. Here’s what I first tried:
- Create Parallels VM on Mac A
- Copy VM to USB hard drive
- Connect USB hard drive to Mac B
- Copy VM to Mac B
- Run VM on Mac B
Result: Parallels tells me that my VM is corrupted. Crap. So I tried again with a slightly modified set of steps:
- Create Parallels VM on Mac A
- Copy VM to USB hard drive
- Connect USB hard drive to Mac B
- Run VM on USB hard drive via Mac B (tell Parallels that VM is ‘copied’)
- Copy VM to Mac B
- Run VM on Mac B
Now the VM is running fine on the second computer. I’ll look around for details as to why the first workflow fails but the second doesn’t.
