Tuesday May 09, 2006

I've been kicking the tires a bit on Parallels Workstation 2.1, the virtualization software available from Parallels Software International as a beta version for Intel-based Macs. I'm running Beta6 on my 2GB 1.83GHz Mac Book Pro.

While I like the software well enough to have pre-ordered the final version, this is clearly still a beta quality release at best.

So far, I've created a single virtual machine and installed Windows XP. The installation went relatively smoothly, though for some reason the CD/DVD drive disconnected several times from the virtual machine during the installation process and I had to restart the VM to get it reconnected. A minor annoyance in what was otherwise pretty straightforward.

Having an XP instance available within my Mac OS environment is going to be very useful for running several Windows applications that I need occasionally. It will be much more convenient than rebooting to the XP partition I've also installed on my Mac Book Pro. I'm hoping eventually to reclaim that partition once Parallels is running solidly.

I'm not currently using Parallels due to the last failure I had. A few days ago I shut the lid on the laptop to put the machine to sleep with a VM running. As I closed it, the chipper and very familiar Windows shutdown tune sounded off just as the lid reached the keyboard. That didn't sound good. And, in fact, it wasn't. When I reopened the laptop, Mac OS had shut down. And when I restarted Parallels and tried to start XP, I found that the virtual disk was corrupted and the virtual machine was continually trying and failing to start XP.

I'm going to wait for another few releases before going to the trouble of reinstalling XP.

It's a great idea, offered at a great price. But, please, make it a great product!