PD 4 performance with the new Macbook Pro 17"?

Hello, has anyone had the privilege to try the new Macbook Pro 17", with 8 Gb of RAM and Parallels 4.0 running multiple virtual machines simultaneously?

I run PD 4 on my Macbook Pro 15" (2.5 GHz C2D with 4 Gb of RAM) and usually, I have a CentOS 5.2 server virtual machine running as well as a Windows XP SP2 vm, on top of OS X and a dozen or so opened apps.

Things hold up pretty well (I've given 1.5 Gb of memory to Windows, 512 MB to CentOS and optimized for OS X performance, not guest OS) but I was wondering how big of a performance boost I might get if I ran 2 x Windows XP (with 1.5 Gb each), CentOS (with 1 or 1.5 Gb instead of 512 Mb) and Mac OS X on the new, sweet MBP w/ 8 Gb of memory.

Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

The bottleneck may be disk I/O access, if you put one or 2 VMs on external disk, I think there will be no problems.

 

Hi John, thanks for your post. Interesting, that surprises me.

Does disk I/O come into play unless there's a ton of activity on all 4 OSes simultaneously? For example, if I have PostgreSQL running in every instance and did a giant query on a giant database (that doesn't fit in memory), I would expect my computer to basically come to a crawling stop and clearly, disk I/O won't be even close to keeping up.

But if I'm running a handful of apps in every guest OS, where each has plenty of memory (so no virtual memory page ins / outs should happen), then is it still potentially an issue?

Thanks!

 

It actually depends on disk, each device has its level when you start to get I/O errors
And application depends of way it is programming,
For Example if you install Excange 2003, the most activity will be on disk cache