Parallels virtual disk dance of pain

Brian, Mike, thanks for the walkthroughs.

Mike, I was under the impression that MigrateEasy was the Acronis product that was best suited for this approach, but if TrueImage worked for you that's great. FYI some of the Acronis code is already in Parallels to support the snapshot feature -- Acronis is another SWsoft sister company.

I was able to resize a Parallels virtual drive using Acronis True Image. I posted about it at http://www.mcdevzone.com/2007/06/18/tip-resizing-a-disk-image-in-parallels-desktop-30

@John Vilsack: Here are the instructions I wrote for how to migrate a Parallels VM to a VMware VM.

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=88195

I suggest reading the whole thread, including Pat Lee's comment (the tenth one down), which suggests an excellent improvement to my instructions.

What I did with my Parallels-PC XP was just map my .iMac drive as a shared drive. I now store eveything there, including my Windows stuff. Now I don't care that my Parallels drive is small because I don't use it! Only Applications and windows files there. I imagine that the applications can even be moved over to the mac drive.
Works great and all my stuff is in the same place.

I've been using PArallels ever since the first beta and my impressions are that it's gotten progressively worse with each update. So when version 3 rolled around and the demo not only didn't work but nearly hosed my entire Mac I switched teams and tried Fusion.

Man am I happy I did. Fusion may not have as many features but it works. It doesn't slow my Mac down, it doesn't cause any crashes, it doesn't refuse to turn on, it has a huge library of virtual appliances - and it's still only a beta.

Excellent product and I'll be sure to take advantage of the trial discount.

I am a license holder of Parallels, but I would like to convert my existing Parallels VM to a VMWare one. Does anyone have any ideas or an easy to use how-to?

I tried searching the interwebs, to no avail.

Thanks!

Try CrossOver (codeweavers.com), excellent low cost implementation of open-source WINE which gives better functionality than Parallels without as many workarounds, without the expense of a Windows license, and with better performance. If you just want to run standard Windows apps like Office inside an OS-X environment, this is the way to go . . plus free trial to see how well it works for you . . no nonsense about designating a special vritual drive, or any of these other issues; it just interacts with your existing drive systems. I also started with Parallels but have not used it in months since I installed CrossOver. Oh, and the licensed version is cheap too.

From the VMWare web site :

For a limited time, VMware Fusion is available for pre-order for only $39.99, a 50% savings over the suggested retail price of $79.99 when VMware Fusion is released for general availability.

Bought Parellels 2.x. It served my needs (mostly), but was anything but Mac-like. Ever since VMWare beta3 (and the disabling of the debugging code) I haven't looked back. It's virtualization codebase is more mature, its interface is more Maclike, and its "Unity" feature works better than Coherence for me. ACPI support makes inporting from Boot Camp and real machines trivial (I move my work Thinkpad into a VM all the time to reduce travel weight).

Get VMWare while it's cheap - you won't be disappointed!

Shrinking: You could try using Parallels Compressor, built into the app; however, if your disk image is fixed-size, Compressor won't shrink it. You can go through the cloning methods mentioned above -- MigrateEasy will copy your installation to a smaller disk, as will VMware Converter.