Questions about Beta5 stability

Hello ... I’m considering installing Parallels on our new Macbook Pro, but I’ve got a few questions about the stability of Beta5. This machine is non-critical for work, but we’d rather it, obviously, not be down for significant periods of time. We’d also like very much to be able to run Windows XP in OSX. We’ll just be running one Windows XP VM. My questions:

1) Are kernel panics frequent and common among all users? Is there any way to minimize your risk of kernel panics?

2) Are some guest OSs more stable than others?

3) We’ve got very good backups (cloned backup of entire hard drive every week, incremental backup of home directory every day). Would it be of any value to install Parallels on our cloned backup and see how it works before we install it on the internal startup disk? Would this, in any way, minimize the risk to the machine?

I guess I’m really try to balance two needs here: Having Windows XP on the Macbook Pro would increase our productivity, but we’d like to keep this machine up and running as much as possible. Should we just wait for Parallels to get out of beta testing before we install it? Or do you guys feel its ‘stable enough’ to give it a try now?

Thanks in advance guys!

 

Although I have had fairly good luck with beta5, the best response to your question is "try it". It's a free trial beta. Get a copy, install it, try it out. Regardless of what is posted here, you should go through an evaluation period before deploying software.
Of course, if you must have stability, running beta software in a production environment is potentially grounds for terminating your admin.

 

`For me, the last two betas were very stable, but 5 triggers lots of kernel panics...so much so that I will not be using it again until Beta 6. From what I have read in this forum, the current beta has been wreaking a fair amount of havoc.

 

I think it's because beta5 has lots of new features... and you know what they say... with more features comes more bugs. Personally, beta5 hasn't crashed or kp'ed once, but it doesn't 'feel' as smooth. I'm running Win2k on it, though.

 

I haven't had a kernel panic yet with either beta4 or beta5. I did observe Parallels crash when the Macbook was put to sleep and then woken again, but it didn't result in an OS X panic.

Admittedly I don't do a lot that stresses my machine. Safari and iTunes on the OS X host OS. The Linux guest OS runs Evolution and some applications I use for work. I use ext3 for Linux to avoid filesystem corruption if Parallels crashes and I have a daily backup job for /home.

 

I'd say that I'm getting more crashing and network problems with beta 5 but it's somewhat subjective and pretty much seems related to full screen mode. Here's the list I've been able to isolate so far (albiet without much discreet debugging):

1) When in full screen mode and when shutting down XP I get a critical error after XP appears to have shutdown and after the screen exists full screen mode.
Received SIGSEGV: Segmentation fault
Access to fault address: 0x1a427048
unknown signal sender: 1
If I exit FS mode first, this does not happen. I'm using Virtue so this might be affecting it but I'm not sure. I'll figure that out tomorrow.

2) The Cisco VPN is broken partially with this release. In beta 4, I noticed that if I disabled the vi2 adapter, I could establish a connection from within the guest and host (using Airport) with the 4.90/4.80 Mac/Win VPN software. Now, regardless of the adapter being enabled or not (in the OS X net pref.), the guest cannot obtain an IP address from the DNS when the host is connected through either TCP or UDP. This, of course, prevents the connection from the guest. Even pings to the remote IP address fail. Again, more time needs to be spent on this, however, if I disconnect the host VPN, the guest works fine (over TCP). Why the host is getting in the way is not clear to me as the host continues to function just fine regardless of the guest tunnel.

In terms of stability, I'd say that XP under my Macbook is at least as stable as my HP lapbrick. In fact, since discovering Parallels, the HP hasn't been on (except to rip all of my files off of it). I'm putting a heavy load on this MacBook also. I've got Oracle, Tomcat, and much more all running on both the host and guest at the same time. So far, it's holding up well and getting close, but not quite, out of real memory. Truly impressive if you ask me.

Beta 5 has caused a few BSOD too but without any way to reliably reproduce it I'll defer until I can put my finger on it.

MacBook Pro 2.16 2GB
OS 10.4.6
WinXP SP2
Parallels beta 5

 

Windows Explorer application freezes after resume

I have commented in another thread that I also find beta 5 curiously unstable compared to betas 3 and 4. I had upgraded an XP Professional VM created using beta 3 to beta 4 and all was well. I did not have to update the Parallels Tools software. I then upgraded the same VM to work under beta 5 and had to update the Parallels Tools install. There were installation problems here (asking for files off of the Windows XP install CD) and then getting blocked because the iso image of the tools image was no longer mapped to the CD device.

I thought I had overcome this -- later I thought I did manage to install the tools and the mouse pointer worked like I expected it to. But before too long, I was having serious problems with the VM's hard disk image -- spontaneous re-boots when trying to just use Windows Explorer to browse for files.

This evening I re-installed both Parallels beta 5 and Windows XP into a new bigger hard disk image and things seem better but suspending and resuming the VM led me to a frozen VM after I tried to re-use a Windows Explorer I had left open.

Edit: I first closed the open Explorer window, then suspended, then resumed the VM and opened a fresh browser. Bam! -- Parallels VM freezes and and the VM has to be re-set. The Parallels app itself continues to run OK -- I send a problem report about this problem while the VM was hung.

Until I see the next beta, I am going to avoid using Suspend and Resume and shut down the VM when I am finished with it. The time to launch is still pleasingly fast. I also saved a clean .hdd file after the Windows install in case this one goes south on me.

Jim

 

I started with Beta 1, which rebooted my MBP every time I put it to sleep, which made it unusable. I'm up to Beta 5 now. I haven't had a single kernel panic. After Beta 4 I can put it to sleep. But now I only have 380K of free disk space on my VM. I'm a professor and it's the end of semester crunch and I don't have time to make a bigger drive and reinstall all my apps. So for now I'm hardly using it at all b/c I don't have enough disk space. I had a problem where my keyboard stopped working and I had to reboot my machine, and once the VM wouldn't wake up from sleep. Those are the only problems I've had since it stopped rebooting on every sleep. For a beta, I'd say it's pretty good.

 

I got 5 kernel panics in a 24 hours period with Beta5.

That being said, I was able to stabilize it by disabling the Shared Folders option and installing the updated PW tools. I've been very cautious with using it and have made a copy of my working drive image just in case something gets hosed, but so far so good, I seemed to have elimiated the kernel panics.

YMMV