Comments on: Parallels and Leopard: A Must Have for the Business Mac User

By: E.T.Cook

E.T.Cook — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 05:21:48 +0000

It is extremely agitating not to be able to utilize both the bootcamp form of Windows alongside the VMWare form because of the activation restrictions. (It sees the “hardware changes” and deactivates you when you switch to the other form).

I am no Windows hater by any means, but this is plain out frustrating when I purchased a legitimate copy of Vista Business.

By: Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:39:35 +0000

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft is going to deal with virtualization and their activation process – something I’ve not thought about! Perhaps this is one of the advantages of going with Microsoft’s new virtualization package, Hyper-V!

Sneaky!

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:16:36 +0000

I just upgraded Parallels to the latest version, and now Vista (Business) is requiring me to activate it again, and online activation doesn’t work. This also happens if you want to run VMware or Parallels in conjunction with bootcamp.

By: Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 14:55:04 +0000

Hi E.T.,

I’m afraid I’m a newb when it comes to VMWare and don’t have it up. I suppose it’s because everything I needed is working great with Parallels. As I wrote Dale above, VMWare will be a major part of our production deployment soon, though. We’ll be able to replicate environments and bring up different ‘flavors’ of our application next year.

By: Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 14:52:21 +0000

Not sure Linux is in my near future from a desktop business user standpoint. With Parallels I can run all the business apps that I need. I can also run Linux in Parallels (I had Ubuntu up but really messed up my installation!).

I am a fan of virtualization and VMWare. I am actually moving our production environment to Bluelock, a company that’s mastered virtualization for hosted applications with VMWare.

Good to see you here, Dale! I saw the ExactTarget IPO paperwork was submitted to the SEC. Cool stuff!

By: E.T.Cook

E.T.Cook — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 08:49:06 +0000

A post about virtualization and the mac, and you only mention one of the major players? Where is the love for VMWARE (which I think is superior…just seems more “polished”).

By: Dale McCrory

Dale McCrory — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 04:36:00 +0000

I use VMWare Fusion, which I believe is a better option, as it’s more standardized. What are you going to do with your Parrallels Windows instance if you want to move to linux in the future? Not problem with Fusion…

By: Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 01:18:03 +0000

It’s not too bad, Mike. For each OS instance you set up, you can set the amount of memory associated. I have 2Gb of RAM and have Windows XP running with up to 1Gb.

It doesn’t take much processor power to run either OS – but the applications you run in it will be hogs if they were hogs before.

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 00:53:49 +0000

I was thinking about getting this for my work mac, so I can test web sites on Windows browsers…I’m wondering how much of a resource hog it is?

By: Alex B

Alex B — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 00:42:04 +0000

Mac is the way to go, especially now with Parallels. Getting ready to install Leopard on my wife’s mac laptop. At my last job was pushing for a mac laptop to truly test cross browser on 1 machine rather than requiring a test lab.

I’ve had my Mac desktop for years and have not had any issues with it like i tend to using PC and windows.