To make a long story short I spent the last few hours converting my VirtualBox VMs over to parallels. I own Parallels 5 Desktop and chatted with Parallels online this morning about upgrading to Parallels 6 Desktop and in short they said I could allocate 24GB to my VMs in Parallels 6 Desktop, I noted that I had read something to the contrary and they re-confirmed I could allocate 24GB to the VMs. In short I wasted a few hours since I cannot allocate more then 8GB of RAM per VM,
I can see that the Hypervisor core is the same between most of Parallels products and changing the amount of RAM in the config file itself results in a message stating my activation key doesn't support this much RAM.
Maybe they were using Parallels Server, or maybe they were using a special tech support only activation key that allows more than 8 GB of RAM, or maybe they thought you were talking about hard disk space instead of RAM, or maybe they don't have any Macs with more than 8 GB of RAM to test and they couldn't imagine that their otherwise awesome product would have such an arbitrary limitation. Anyway, the Parallels Desktop User’s Guide does note the 8 GB RAM limit for virtual machines: http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/technical-documentation/
