Windows 7 RTM Installs - Some Insight

I'm running on an 8 core Mac Pro, Snow Leopard (had the same problems under Leopard, 10.5.8), with the Apple RAID card, 4 drives setup as a RAID 0+1, 10GB of RAM, and dual GeForce 8800GT's, with both NICs connected via Gigabit.

I've tried for days to get Windows 7 Enterprise to install. I'm using my sysprep'd build of 7 that works on every single piece of hardware I've tossed it at, which has been a wide, wide variety of machines. I do IT support for my University and imaging & builds is part of my job. By the way, even installs from a Windows 7 DVD run sysprep once the files have been transferred to the destination HD, so this is no big deal.

Anyway, I've been trying to get this thing up and running and have been running into multiple problems where Windows wouldn't get past some point during sysprep, or it'd lock up for who knows what reason. Well, I think I have it figured out.

In most cases I thought that my problems were video related. This time around I switched the number of CPU's from 4, to 1, and sysprep completed just fine, no lock ups. Given on physical machines we've dealt with Intel Atoms, Core 2's, etc. so the number of CPU's shouldn't be an issue, but it might be with Windows 7 + Parallels for the time being. I'm planning on shutting the VM down, switching the number of CPU's to say, 2, and will see what happens.

SO, for those of you installing Windows 7, I'd suggest starting out with 1 CPU and work your way up if you so choose.

My Parallels VM is now setup with 1 CPU, 4GB (4096MB) of RAM, 256MB of VRAM with 3D Acceleration on, no floppy, physical CD/DVD-ROM drive, 200GB drive set to auto-expand, bridged networking, Sound active, and no USB devices connected.

I'm also running Parallels 4.0, build 3846.

 

UPDATE: Sure enough, I shut the VM down, switched it to 2 CPUs and it instantaneously locked up during the Win 7 startup animation.

I went in again, switched it to 4 CPUs but also turned off the Adaptive Hypervisor and changed the option (that I didn't see before, duh) to max. performance. I'm booted up now.

 

So through the course of the night, I left the VM running, came into the office this morning and the video's locked up to the point where I can't click on anything. At the time I was installing Adobe Design Premium CS4 from a network share, the setup screen asking for a serial number was up with a blinking cursor in the first line, but I couldn't click on it nor anything else on screen.

I was running the VM with 2 CPUs because it locked up on me, again, with 4. My post earlier in the day: http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=93230 details the video freezes I was having. Didn't want to create a double post, but I didn't see said post for a good couple hours.

 

Another update, tried cloning again, same thing. This time I tried with a brand new VM.

I also setup a new VM in VMWare Fusion, 2.0.5, did a network boot to our PXE server, used a Ghost Solution Suite 2.5 task to clone our build of Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit (we also have a 32-bit build) RTM back to the VMWare VM, and it's up and running.

I have setup this VM in VMWare Fusion with 4 CPUs, 4GB (4096MB) of RAM, 3D Acceleration, 200GB drive (SCSI, which was the same as Parallels), Sound active, no USB devices connected, and no Other Devices connected. I've really tried to set it up as similar as possible to my Parallels VM.

The biggest thing is that the VM in VMWare went all the way through sysprep, I've installed the VMWare Tools (I WAS able to install the Parallels Tools before) and it's still up and running with 4 CPUs.

I'm not trolling nor bashing here, in fact I really want to use Parallels over VMWare. However, if the VM in Parallels isn't going to be stable, then I really don't have a choice but to use VMWare Fusion at this point. Maybe I'll go back to Parallels when the kinks get worked out.

 

Thanks for sharing your experience. My Windows 7 VM has video locked up often too, and the only way to fix it is to shut it down and reboot. I has 4 CPUs before and now reduce it to 1 CPU. I will see if it helps.

 

I was having problems with my Mac Pro a few days ago - namely the whole system was being slow under Snow Leopard. I opened Activity Monitor to see that CoreRAIDServer was pegged at 100%, i.e. it was taking up an entire core (800% would mean all cores). I also couldn't open Raid Utility.app. So I completely backed up everything, formatted and installed Snow Leopard clean. This time around I rebuilt everything by hand; previously I had backed up, formatted, installed Snow Leopard, and then let the Migration Assistant move everything back over. Something got borked, don't know.

Anyway, so this time I rebuilt by hand; reinstalling all apps either via drag & drop if appropriate, or by running their respective installer, which included Parallels & VMWare Fusion.

I tried installing Windows Server 2008 R2 from ISO via Parallels Desktop 4.0 build 3846 and 59% of the way through expanding files & folders while booted from the ISO, the VM in Parallels locked up. I then tried the exact same thing in VMWare Fusion and it worked. Until this is fixed I have to give up on Parallels, no choice.

For the record I had configured the server with 2 CPU's, 2048MB of RAM, 200GB drive, 3D Acceleration, 256MB of vRAM. VMWare Fusion was configured as similarly as I could. I'm now on my way to configuring Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 inside this VMWare Fusion VM, basically it works.