Beta for production

Hi All!

I have just bought a MBP 2.0 on witch I am planning to use as my only laptop - doing my .NET development etc. My plan was that I would use it to get to know OSX until Parallels came out as a final release. I have had my Mac for two days now, and I can't wait to throw out my IBM T43p and start using my Mac for everything, so I guess I have to use the beta. In that regard I have a few questions:

1. I know that using beta software for a production environment isn't that wise, but how is Beta6? Is anyone here using it for development without problems?

2. Will my MacOS installation "degrade" the more Parallels betas I upgrade to making it nessesary to reinstall MacOs? (forgive me - I come from Windows where this definetley will happen). I know about the principle of applications being just a directory witch should prevent this, but it seems that parallels has an installer just like in Windows - that makes me nervous

3. Will the Windows installation I make in the VM "degrade" when upgrading the betas and parallels tools?

4. Will I need to scrap my VM and rebuild when the final release comes out (no I don't - I know - but will it be the smartest thing to do?)

Thanks for your replys - and thanks to Parallels for making the product!

Regards,

Jacob

 

1. I personally don't think beta6 is still 'there' in terms of 'suitable for production use' but I think I saw a couple of guys in the forum already doing that anyway.

2. This application needs an installer because it puts the required kernel extensions in the system. System does not 'degrade' with subsequent upgrading of PW.

3. The rotting Windows phenomenon is largely related to the applications not managing its pieces properly, which is, by design, easier to happen on Windows than OS X. In my experience, the Parallels Tools uninstaller does a fairly good job of cleaning up, and normally, subsequent upgrading of the Tools in a typical uninstall-then-install manner won't contribute much to the whole 'degrading' problem, IMO.

4. I've been doing that for every beta that came out until around beta4... then I realized it was pointless.

 

I've been using Parallels for real work for several weeks now, although my needs are fairly limited, and I keep regular backups of my data files.

My trust in the program has passed my fear of losing data.

I do have occasional glitches, but it hasn't spontaneously crashed or rebooted my Mac in since beta 4, so I'm feeling pretty good about it.

 

I use Beta 6 for production work. This includes Delphi 7, SQL server, and Sketchup. The only problem I have is every 20 hours of use or so it will simply reboot OSX. No warning, simply restarts. Aware of the danger of this I have an external drive that I copy my xp images to every night. Of course that's good practice anyways but...

As long as you are prepared to lose up to a days work AND have the time to potentially reinstall OSX and parallels if something terrible happens it seems ok.

It is the bleeding edge though.

 

Thanks for all your replys - I have made the decission to go ahead and risk it - I will move all my work to the VM. I will take backup a couple of times a day for starters.

Isn't there something about the disks not being resizeable? Parallels defaults to an 8GB disk but that will be way too small if I cant expand it. Microsoft virtual PC had an option to choose "expandable" witch created a disk that could expand without limits. I have read that Parallels can't do that, so what to do? Create a disk of 10000GB and then choose expandable? That should create a disk of limited physical size and make sure that I never run out of space? What have you guys done?

Regards,

Jacob

 

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The way 'expandable disk' works is the same with VirtualPC and PW, I thought? A partition cannot dynamically expand, so what you do is to make an expandable disk with maximum size of a reasonably large value, and create a partition on it. The partition would be as big as that maximum size but physical disk image file won't be anywhere that big until you really fill it up. Of course, all those disk resizing discussion involves the point about when you DO actually reach the maximum size you've previously defined, and want to expand further.

PW initially does default to 8000MB when you create a VM, but you can just 'recreate' the thing to any size you want because at that point nothing is in the disk image anyway. Personally, that's why my Win2k VM has disk image size of 2048MB...

 

Since the disks expand up to the size you specify, but take up less space until you get there, I generally pick a nice big size and let it expand as needed. I think I'm using 30 GB or so. Only occupies 4.7 GB on my hard drive right now.

 

I am also using parallels for semi production work. The key is to make sure that the actual work isn't only on the parallels machine. For me, all my work sits in a VSS Database on another machine. That way when I am connected I can check in with no worries about whats on the guest os. If something goes wrong, I can simply rebuild it and do a quick "get latest" and I am up and running.

 

Thanks again - I'll make the virtual disk 30 GB and expanding - that ought to do it.

Is there any indication to when a final release will be available?

 

PW/Mac OS reliability

I see you already made your decision, but maybe you would like to see what I've run into. I bought a Mac Mini Intel just so that I could use .NET at home (running Windows being the only reason I bought a new Mac! haha)


So, in terms of system degradation:

- Once you've got a fully running PW VM setup, meaning it's got Windows running happily in there etc. Just back-up the directory for that VM (this includes the harddrive and PW config file for it, do this After fully shutting down the running VM of course).
This is great in terms of having a "just in case everything goes nutty" Windows system. I had to use my backup once, a number of Betas ago, but never since, even if the system hung in some strange way (the VM hung, that is)

I have a few versions of the VM backed-up: one totally clean Windows install, one after WinUpdate, another after installing all my programs. Helps me rest easier when working on it.
Thus your fear of the Windows system degrading is completely circumvented. The Windows system, as far as I've seen (for about 4 weeks), doesn't even know there's a Parallels and thus doesn't appear to degrade anyway.

- The Mac OS seems greatly unaffected by Parallels W., the largest thing I noticed was that not having enough physical RAM slowed things down (different from Beta 5!), but I'm sure you're comp's maxed out and you won't notice that. Thus, even if things go all wonky, PW is still perfectly force-quittable and Mac OS never dies. The worst I had, w/ too little RAM (1Gig! which never happened on Beta 5, so i think it'll get fixed eventually) was a massive slow-down of everything on the Mac, only while shutting down/starting up the WinXP VM.
[ As an aside: many apps on the Mac have to use installers, but un-installing without an installer *typically*, 90% of the time, only means checking your /Library and ~/Library for appropriately named items, in the "Extensions", "Application Support" and other such folders. It Never gets more complicated than that. In fact, having to check the "Extensions" folder is more complicated than usual. I'd be willing to bet moving/removing "/Library/Startup Items/Parallels" disables any modifications of the Mac OS.]

- The "just in case" Windows backup is great if you use Windows-to-Mac networking (try "SharePoints" for the Mac-side) or the built-in "Shared Folders", 'cuz you can just back-up to (or even work directly out-of) a folder on your Mac/somewhere. Hasn't failed me yet.



Problems:
I've found when my Mac sleeps, the VM dies, although Parallells is responsive and so is everything else, but the VM's just dead. This may only be a problem with Mini's; MBPros appear to be quite awesome. I've never had Windows actually get corrupted by this though, I even skip the disk-checks out of laziness too (since i can just copy a backup if it is corrupted...)

Please post if .NET gives you wierd problems, I've had some but I think that's just cuz I haven't upgraded to the latest yet. I'm not a full-blown developer, so I'm not so inclined to purchase my own personal license, I just use it for only one project at my university.


Also, if all else sucks, BootCamp is the most reliable alternative you could have. Nothing goes wrong in that.

 

Using PW beta 6 for production

So, if you use beta6 for production what can happen?
An unexpected kernel panic which has you loose your data? Well Windows is perfectly capable of doing that by itself on your t43, so not really a difference, is it
And if you back up your dtata files (preferrably external hdd), you are super safe. The possible need to reinstall Windows, well you should still be used to that

 

konstantin> You're right - Windows can crash all by it self. That isn't my main concern. I was more worried that the entire OS (OS X) would sddently crash beoynd recovery and I would waste a whole day reconstructing - or something. You know - when you are very dependant upon something you want to make sure it is working ok.

Djoh>Thanks for your reply - I have run virtual machines on Windows before, so I was going to have backups of the disk at different stages, that will save some time if everything goes down. As to memory I have 2GB in the "book" so that ought to do it. I have a Mini too, and it had 1GB too - I'll try to run the VM on it when I get it created. I'll get back to you if .NET dosn't behave - I do pretty heavy development, let's hope it goes ok

 

This sounds like it may be the "sound adapter bug". Try removing the sound adapter from your VM config. I had similar issues with XP under PW. I would suspend XP, sleep the mac, resume the mac and restart XP in PW and it would hang every time.

-Will

 

Yeah mine does this when I have a Parallels VM running, and i just leave and come back hours later after the computer's gone to sleep by itself. That's enough to come back to a dead VM. I'll look around the forums for that bug, that would be great if there was a fix to that! Thanks!

 

Well... I got Parallels installed - and Wndows. I have a MacBook Pro with a Danish keyboard. And.... I can't write a backslash :-( That is a major showstopper for me. Does anyone have an idea? Is it a known error?

Regards,

Jacob