I've just noticed in both my Vista RC1 and WinXP virtual machines that I'm getting half-duplex 10BaseT networking with the option of going full duplex. The Macs all come with gigabit ethernet, vastly speedier than the poky 10Mbps speed of 10BaseT by two orders of magnitude. Are there plans to eventually go gigabit in our VM's?
In XP, install Parallels tools to get faster networking. Same in Vista when the tools become available.
The 10BaseT speeds are with Parallels Tools installed. What speeds are you getting? EDIT: I just looked up the specs for the RTL8029 NIC that Parallels emulates. It's a 10BaseT card and therefore has a speed of only 10Mbps with potential for twice that speed using full-duplex mode. The only way to speed things up is if Parallels decides to emulate a faster card, hopefully a gigabit card or chipset.
One of the problems I've encountered in the past is with people believing whatever they see on a screen. Parallesl is NOT limited to 10Mb just because it claims to emulate a slow card. The emulation is of the protocol, not the speed. Emulaltors typically emulate the function of whatever they are emulating, but seldom in real time. CPU emulators are often slower than real time, and other functions are asynchronous and can be much faster. Even CPU emulators can be faster than the real hardware if the real hardware is old enough (1960's mainframe emulated on a PC for example). The NIC emulation in Parallels feeds packets to the OSX infrastructure as fast as OSX is willing to accept them, and is very slow over a wireless link with a weak signal, and very fast over a gigabit ethernet link that's properly configured at all points. The specs for the hardware being emulated have nothing to do with timing.
