Setting Sail for the Promised Land

In my previous post, I explained why I decided to wade into the Parallels universe. In this article I thought I would begin by describing my goals for this experiment.

In short, I was looking for a fully functional Windows production environment, running on a VM. Anything less, would not be satisfactory. At least the short term, I planned to be spending the majority of my time in the Windows environment, using multiple programs with many concurrent open windows. Furthermore I had just upgraded to Adobe Creative Suite 4, and I wasn't crazy about the notion of paying to side grade the suite over to Mac. So with this in mind, let me recount my experience...

My Environment at Initial Install

Hardware:
MacBook Pro 13"; 2.53 GHz dual core processor; 3Mb L2 cache; Memory 4Gb;Bus Speed 1.07 GHz; Hard Drive, 250 Gb.

Software:
MacOS 10.4 (Leopard); Parallels Desktop for Mac 4; Windows XP Pro, SP3

Installation of Parallels Desktop for Mac was very straight forward. As was the cloning my Dell Latitude, to a VM (Virtual Machine) on an external hard drive, using the Parallels Transporter tool and following the instructions from the Parallels manual; resulting in a 60Gb file!

Getting the VM onto My New Mac

The trickier part was importing the VM onto my new Mac. As it turns out, it wasn't all that difficult, but for a newcomer to Parallels Desktop, more detailed instructions from the Parallels manual, would have been helpful.
        
To explain the issue that I ran into, a basic understanding of Hard Drive Formats is helpful. Three common HD formats were involvedcin my migration: NTFS, FAT32 and Mac OS Extended (journaled). 

• NTFS - Is capable of writing large files; i.e. >16gb. It can be read by MacOS; but the Mac cannot write to NTFS.
• FAT32- BOTH Mac OS and Windows can read/write FAT32; but there is a 4gb file size limit.
• Mac OS Extended (journaled), can read and write large files, just like NTFS, but it is Mac proprietary, or at least it is not supported by Windows.

So, that means you have to write your VM onto a NTFS formatted hard drive, which I did, with the understanding that the Mac could read it. An indeed, once I connected the hard drive to my Mac, I was able to see the file, no problem.  

Using the Parallels Transporter wizard on the Mac to import an existing VM, I was asked for the location of the source VM to import, from my external NTFS hard drive, and for a destination location create the new VM. It all seemed pretty straight forward. So I started the process and off it went. After five or ten minutes of calculating, I got a fatal error message stating there was some sort of I/O write error.

Determined!

Needless to say I was disappointed and baffled. I'll spare you all the angst and hours or research trying to find a workaround on the Parallels forums, etc.

It finally occurred to me that maybe Parallels Transporter was trying to write some temporary data to the NTFS drive (remember the rules above? - Macs can read, but not write to NTFS), so I decided to copy the source VM to my internal Mac drive, and then run Parallels Transporter. That got the job done... Whew!

Credentials?

No sooner than I overcame this hurdle, I was presented my next challenge: Parallels needs to check that you have a valid Windows license.

Hmmm, I do, I mean did… The license on my Dell laptop was the OEM version of XP Pro, which was factory installed. Would that work? So started the hunt for my original OEM restore disc, that I carefully filed away FOUR YEARS AGO!  And of course, I could not find mine -- but I was able to borrow a friend's. Without any notion as to whether or not this would work, I slipped in the borrowed OEM CD-ROM and dutifully keyed in the Microsoft OS product key from the bottom of my Dell Lap laptop...

I was skeptical. I had always been told that the OEM discs are keyed to Dell hardware, and after all I was launching this VM on a Mac… It worked!!!  

As far as Windows was concerned, I was still running on my original Dell hardware. Pretty cool! 

Up and Crawling…

So now my I had Windows running on my Mac, but the performance was slow – make that SLOW -- and wholly unacceptable. I had no reason to expect anything better, but I was kinda hoping for a happy ending...

All for not?

I decided I was way too far into this to turn back. So with a lot of prayer, research and determination, I began my quest to figure out how I might optimize Parallels AND Windows to improve performance. I spent two weeks tweaking and restarting. Two weeks of virtually getting nothing else done... It was a bit maddening... In the midst of all this my son Zach, said something like, "Hang in there Magellan!" Magellan? My look said it all. With a broad grin, he added, "You're definitely sailing uncharted waters!" And indeed I was.

After a lot of trial and error, and many little optimization tweaks, I was able to get it working -- and working well. In fact the the performance was quite a bit better than my old laptop, and only a little less than a dedicated PC with the same hardware; more than acceptable. I was elated!!   

Here are the key things that helped me resolve my performance issues:

Parallels Desktop Config

I split the 4Gb evenly between my Mac and the VM; this was far more than the recommended 500k that Parallels suggests
I toggled the performance setting to favor the VM over the Mac
I set windows to run full screen on a second monitor, rather than the more novel (and I suspect more memory intensive) Continuity mode

Windows XP Pro Config

I turned off every possible startup process
I set my desktop background to a flat color, instead of an image
I set my virtual memory page file to the maximum suggested by windows, which in my case was 3070 Mb, which again is a far cry more than the 80 Mb that Parallels insists on defaulting to.

I also learned that it is important to keep your virtual hard drive compacted, using Parallel Tools for Windows. Otherwise performance will degrade.

Summary

All in all, I was pleased. I was back to getting things done, and it felt like I had two computers in one! There were a few issues, however, an in my next installment I will outline those…

By the way… I found my original Dell OEM restore disc weeks later ;-)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »