Hello everyone, My first experience with parallels. Installation was smooth, except for a few minor issues related to my distro (ubuntu). On first run, parallels notified me that my CPU supports VT-x but it was disabled in BIOS. I continued to create the VM nonetheless, and I was rather impressed with performance (not counting motion graphics). However I decided to give VT-x a try, hoping for at least a small performance boost, and after a BIOS upgrade I was ready to rock. First issue, however, was that the previously created VM refused to boot. It passed the parallels BIOS then immediately came up with the "bug buddy" crash report. I installed fresh guest os (WinXP) starting from scratch, with VT-x enabled in parallels. The installation took ages - ~45 minutes for the installer to count down from 10 to 9 minutes remaining. It was, to say the least, extremely slow. Suspecting a kernel issue, I decided to compile latest 2.6.20.7 instead of 2.6.17 that shipped with ubuntu. After a few minor modifications to the parallels kernel modules (as discussed elsewhere on the forums), I had it up and running. The speed, however, is still extremely bad. With VT-x I waited half an hour for the "calculating required disk space" initial step of SP2 installation then aborted it. Disabled VT-x and the very same step is done in virtually no time. The Host OS does not seem to be under any kind of stress, on CPU or any other peripheral. The guest OS reports low CPU and memory usage, it is just extremely unresponsive. It does, however, report high disk activity (through the roof of perfmon), even while doing tasks that in theory should not require alot of disk activity (doesn't make any sense to me at all). For example switching from one tab in Opera to another takes an absolute minimum of 5 seconds, all the way up to a couple of minutes or more if I _do_ have some background activity going. I've attempted to disconnect all devices (cd-rom, network etc) but with no signifficant performance increase. I also tried moving the swap file to a separate virtual disk, again with no success. My disk image is not the 'expanding' type (I understand that would impact performance). Soo.. my question is basically this: Is this a known issue? Could it be some kind of kernel feature that I'm missing? Could it be hardware related? My system is a HP Nc6320 Centrino Duo 2.0ghz with 1.5gb RAM and a 100gb SATA drive. Using parallels version 2.2 build 2112. Host os is latest ubuntu, guest is WinXP. Any hints or suggestions as where to look for a solution would be much appreciated, thank you very much
First of all thank you for such a detailed description of your problem. Well, this is not a kind of bug we have filed or know about, i guess you better register this bug with http://www.parallels.com/support/request/ So we can investigate it internally with some more details. In fact, there still could be some situations where 'pure hardware' approach to the virtualization could lead to some performance problems - but these situations are really rare in the real life... Thanks!
