We'll be posting an interview with Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov shortly, but here's a peek at what Parallels can do on a Mac Pro. The video shows some impressive 3D rendering happening inside of two separate Vista virtual machines running simultaneously with OS X 10.5. The essence of the pitch is Parallels' ability to directly access hardware, in this case the video card, to improve performance within each virtual machine. Cool stuff.
F11 moves all your windows off the screen so you can quickly glance at your desktop. F10 shows you every open window in an application. F9 shows every open window for every application that isn't hidden or in the dock.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
a ham sandwich said 11:17AM on 6-16-2009
how long does it have to take these guys to get aero running? vista i can let slide, but now with win7 on the horizon, i think they need to make that a priority.
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dagamer43 said 11:38AM on 6-16-2009
So true. Vista/Windows 7 without Aero looks so UGLY. =/
colin_young said 11:17AM on 6-16-2009
So they can directly access the card to give us accelerated 3D but still can't support dual-monitors in the guest OS?
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mcbeen said 12:29AM on 8-13-2009
They support it just fine. I'm using it right now.
Tom said 11:32AM on 6-16-2009
This is huge for me. If Parallels gets this out before VMWare (VT-d, ie what they call FastTrack), I may become a VM switcher.
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Sal said 12:05PM on 6-16-2009
Figures. I just switched to Fusion. Parallels was just not stable running Vista on my Macbook. It's fine with an XP image, but there were too many times where the Parallels would completely hang (especially after I updated to the latest rev).
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jasenbourne said 1:11PM on 6-16-2009
Is this feature in there now in the current version? Meaning the almost direct hardware access in this case.
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Jorn said 1:48PM on 6-16-2009
WHy is it that I have yet to encounter a person who uses Parallels who ever has it running at even half the speed shown in these demos?
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Kennon said 2:19PM on 6-16-2009
I agree Jorn. I own Parallels 4, and it is a slouch in the performance department. I keep hoping that they beef up their tech and make a super product, but it just doesn't perform well enough for me to use it day to day. VMWare Fusion isn't much better, but it's good enough that I choose to use it instead of Parallels.
I will be curious to see how this progresses. If we can get native hardware access, it could be huge for the virtualization of Windows/Linux and OS X. But at this juncture, it's just a tech demo on a highly optimized Mac Pro that will never actually be able to be replicated.
Rick said 4:46PM on 6-16-2009
What in the world are you guys talking about? I'm running Windows 7 beta in Parallels on a Macbook Pro without any problems at all. No lag, no crashing...nothing. I don't use Aero, I feel it's a waste of space and just not needed, so I have no problem with that. The seemless integration with OS X 10.5 is just astonishing. I can drag and drop things from Windows to the OS X desktop and save and use them later on.
My favorite thing is the ability to, with a single click, run Windows 7 in full screen mode on a 30 inch screen and have the Dock show up or have the Widgets show up while in Windows, without leaving Windows. If I can't find a program in Windows, I just jump to the OS X dock and share the directory where I have the file. Seemless !!!
One more thing ..... More on the downside, my Macbook Pro runs really hot with Windows 7 running, up to about 160 degrees farhenheit on the CPU with the disk spinning and stays at about 148-155 degrees. On the other hand, running a VPN with Mac OS X natively, without the Windows emulation brings the temperature down to 115 degrees. I think that this may be due to memory, with the disk drive playing Ram. Uncertain if this is common knowledge, but perhaps they could do something about that.
Overall, I've never used VMWare, so I can't compare, but Parallels has been astonishing. It's a real shock to C:// on a Mac.
Rick.
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mcbeen said 12:34AM on 8-13-2009
Agreed, I really don't know what you guys are talking about. I LIVE in parallels all day every day with multiple xp and vista images open. It runs fast and stable.
may be all of you are talking about v3?
Jonathan Badeen said 2:06AM on 6-17-2009
I hope they are able to tap into the extra graphics cards on the MBP's in Snow Leopard. How sweet would that be to have a completely dedicated graphics card for the virtual machine.
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