Did a few more tests today and have not yet managed to crash the virtual Win XP machine. Today’s test—the potential dealbreaker—was installing Borland’s Delphi 7 and a few add-on function libraries, then compiling an executable of a menuing/security program I wrote for our public PCs. The install and patching of Delphi 7 went smoothly and after moving the source files to the virtual machine, the compile was quick and perfect. I can now safely give up the laptop I was using for these legacy Windows tasks.
Ran one other test which seems to threaten at least a small tear in the fabric of the universe: While “inside” my virtual XP machine running under Mac OS X on the iMac, I used Windows to “map” to a network volume. The volume was across campus on an Apple G5 running Mac OS X server and exporting its storage under Samba (so it appeared to my virtual machine as a Windows server). Seems to raise some basic questions about just what an OS is these days, doesn’t it?
Other things that worked well: printing to a networked printer and mounting USB keys. Also had success dynamically resizing the “partition” devoted to this virtual Windows machine—Parallels keeps the entire virtual installation in a single file. About the only thing I haven’t tried (and probably won’t since i have no need for the capability) is burning a CD from the virtual windows machine to the Mac’s CD/DVD drive. OK there is one other thing I haven’t tried (despite the geeky allure)—connecting to the virtual machine’s desktop from a copy of Remote Desktop Connection running on the host iMac.
“Deep inside of a parallel universe
It’s getting harder and harder
To tell what came first…”
— RHCP
Update: I was able to connect to the Parallel’s Windows desktop from my desktop mac across the room using Microsoft’s “Remote Desktop Connection.” So now with Apple’s Remote Desktop console running on my desktop G5, I can take over the screen on either OS running on the iMac.
Update 2: Discovered today you can copy the single file that represents your Windows XP virtual machine from your “host” mac to another drive or machine. Then delete the original…then put the copy back and the virtual Windows machine runs fine. This means goodbye to “ghosting”…just keep a copy of your “last known good” Windows VM file and you can always get back a working virtual machine. Right now the “.hdd” file for my Windows VM is about 4 GB in size. Presumably (and I found a forum post that confirmed this for one user), you could move this to a new machine and if Parallels were installed there, boot right into a working version of Windows with no installation fuss. Nice.