I don't know if anyone else has seen this, but if I try to run lets say a vm wint xp set to 512mb ram and a win2k3 server vm with 384kb my mac mini just plops over and literally dies. I have to wait like 5 minutes till I can get one of the vm's and kill it (shut down). Now, I only have 1gb of ram in the mini, so I know I'm pushing the memory of the machine but I would have thought that this would be a bit smoother. Any ideas, besides more ram? Mike V.
Yes, WAY MORE RAM! Your VMS have a total RAM of 896 MB which leaves you with 128MB RAM available. A small amount is needed for the Parallels application, which leaves you WITH LESS THAN 128MB to run OS X! I suggest setting both VMs to 256MB RAM and don't run that many programs on OSX. That should be fairly smooth. But without upgrading your RAM I don't see a chance for your current setup to work anywhere near "smoothly" You might also want to check out this thread: http://forum.parallels.com/thread1532.html In a nutshell: Buy more RAM
Hi Jisi: thanks for the reply. I had read the mentioned thread and thought it dealt more with xp and 128mb of ram. I guess I can do some surgery on the mac-mini and add more ram to it. In the interim, I can cut back the ram setup for both xp and 2k3 and see how that behaves, but in terms of running programs on osx, not much since I have not really done much with the machine except play with parallels on it. MV
Please set for each of VMs <=256M and you will be happy! In your case you allocate too much memory (512 + 384) for your VMs and left none for Mac OS X.
Hi: Ok, I did reduce both VM's to 256Mb and the performance is outstanding!, but, I think you have a bug (already submitted two reports from the AP. When you have XP and 2003 server running and shut one down, Paralles crashes, and it also crashes the other VM (regardless of which one you close first, i.e., if you close XP, 2003 crashes, if you close 2003, XP crashes. In either case, Paralles also crashes. Hey, I'm just playing around seeing what the software does and how the networking works, and I'm still blown away by it. I know y'all will get this bug straightned out. MV
Just to update on this, I experimented wiht the setup, and this time, I disabled the CD-rom's before invoking each VM, shutdown was normal and no Parallels crash. Before, I was leaving the Cd-rom active, and clicking through the error message about the cd-rom not being available in the second VM, which was fine, and I would confirm it was disconnected. It seems that this is what was causing parallels to crash when shutting down either VM Mike V.
