Parallels released an updated beta of their virtualization software for MacIntel today. Among the problems they claim to have fixed is the "host machine panics when it sleeps" bug. Since I am now retyping this blog entry after a MacOSX panic, I can testify that this bug in fact has not been fixed - at least not in all cases.

(The astute Sun blogger should now be wondering why I didn't "Save as draft" before trying a test I expected to kill my machine. Well, I pressed the button. I just hadn't gotten around to training the NoScript Firefox extension that it was OK to execute JavaScript on sun.com.)

The most annoying bug I found last time (the broken "\" and "|" keys) is still there. Luckily, somebody posted a workaround in the comments section of my last entry, so this has been downgraded from Showstopper to Annoyance. Also still present is the PCI timeout problem.

The only real improvement that I've found is the addition of full-screen support, which is a big step forward in usability. In full-screen mode, the mouse tracking does get better. I would prefer it if they polled a little more frequently, but I can live with it.

More on networking performance. As a zero-effort bandwidth test, I used ftp between my machine at home and either ftp.gnu.org or my machine at work. I also tried two different technologies to get through Sun's firewall: IPSec on Solaris and a third party VPN solution on Mac OSX.:

Host	Target	Tunnelling technology	Bandwidth
Mac OSX	ftp.gnu.org	None	634 kB/s
Parallels/Solaris	ftp.gnu.org	None	607 kB/s
Parallels/Solaris	ftp.gnu.org	IPSec	157 kB/s
Parallels/Solaris	Sun Machine	IPSec	161 kB/s
Mac OSX	ftp.gnu.org	VPN	240-290 kB/s (bouncing all over the place)
Mac OSX	Sun Machine	VPN	240-300 kB/s (bouncing all over the place)

Obviously IPSec from inside the VM had the worst bandwidth for this test, backing up the qualitative assessment I made in the last entry. It is delivering only about 25% of what I can get with a direct connection to the network. Since the Parallels network interface delivers more than 95% of the raw network bandwidth to the Solaris VM without any tunnelling, this drop in performance is either the fault of the IPSec software, or its interaction with Parallels.

VPN looks better in this simple test, but in practice I often have it hang on me for seconds or minutes at a stretch. The lower, but more reliable, performance of the IPSec solution is much easier to work with interactively.

There are still some tests I need to do to fill out the picture. First, I need to measure the IPSec performance on a non-virtualized Solaris machine. This will tell me how much of the performance loss can be blamed on the interaction between IPSec and the virtualization environemnt. Second, I want to measure the performance of Solaris IPSec when running in a VMware machine. This will help determine whether this performance drop is specific to the Parallels VM or if it is a common virtualization problem.

I'll start with the punchline. Below is a picture of Mac OSX hosting a Solaris virtual machine, which itself has a Linux zone running on it.

I finally got myself a Mac Mini. I've been planning to buy one since Apple released the first x86-based models. Since I have no use for a computer that can't run Solaris, I had to wait for a few months. For me, the tipping point was not Apple's recent Boot Camp release, even though that does allow you to boot Solaris on a Mac. Instead, it was the announcement of an OS virtualization environment running on MacOSX. I assumed it was just a matter of time before VMware or Microsoft ported their virtualization tools, but some company I had never heard of beat them to it: Parallels.

The Parallels VM is much less featureful than VMware, but it is also much lighter weight. For my simple usage scenario, I really don't need most the bells and whistles VMware provides, so Parallels is fine.

I was able to get S10 FCS installed and running on a Parallels VM on the second try. It would have worked on the first try, but I got fed up with the DVD performance and killed the install. I was then able to Liveupgrade the system to BrandZ using the BrandZ build 35 DVD image.

Now the bad news. Parallels still has quite a way to go before it is ready for prime time - even for casual home use.

There is one level-0 issue that is a complete showstopper for anybody who plans to run Solaris (or any Unix): the '\' and '|' keys don't work. I guess Parallels doesn't do any testing of Unix-based systems at all, or this wouldn't have made it out the door.

Some other issues that I have run into so far

• When the Mac OS sleeps, it panics if Parallels is running. The kernel stack shows that it is running in the Parallels' hypervisor, so this doesn't seem like something you can pin on Apple.
• Adding a second drive leads to PCI timeouts. It doesn't matter which PCI bus it's on or how many busses you have. Since you can't add more disk space, make sure you plan ahead.
• You can't boot from a Solaris Express CD. It does boot an S10 FCS CD, so this is probably something grub related. Having said that, I was able to Liveupgrade to a grub-based build successfully, so it's obvious that grub isn't DOA.
• Parllels doesn't support full-screen mode yet.
• The mouse tracking is a little bit twitchy. I have the same issue with VMware on a Linux system. It seems to be a little better in full-screen mode on VMware, so maybe there is some hope that this will get better when Parallels supports full-screen.
• Solaris doesn't support the network device Parallels pretends to provide. Fortunately, there is a Solaris driver for the device available from the ever-reliable Masayuki Murayama.
• When installing, the DVD performance was terrible - although I can't say whether that is an issue with the Mac or with Parallels. Either way, it was faster for me to stop the install half-way through, rip the DVD to an ISO image, and restart the install with the ISO in place of the physical DVD.
• When connecting to Sun from my Solaris VM at home, the performance seems a little bit sluggish. I suspect this is due to the Parallels network virtualization, but that is purely a guess. I haven't done anything to investigate this yet. It's also possible that there is something in our IPSEC software that suffers in a virtualization environment.
• Liveupgrade is very slow. It took nearly 3 hours to liveupgrade from S10 FCS to Brandz35. I was upgrading from a Solaris install image on an NFS server, so this could easily be another manifestation of network performance issues. I really need to take some measurements...
• If you have two VMs running simultaneously, shutting down or rebooting one will cause the other to die.

I've submitted a few of these problems to Parallels, but their response doesn't fill me with confidence:

             Hello Nils!
             Thank you for your interest in Parallels Workstation.

             We appreciate your feedback.

We'll see how this product improves over the coming months. Since VMware is allegedly planning a Mac OSX release, Parallels has their work cut out for them.