Last week when I had the chance to sit down and geek out with Josh Bancroft, I was again impressed with the performance of Parallels on his MacbookPro. It runs so well that Windows applications seem to be native to the Mac. I was particularly impressed (again) with
I’m looking forward to Parallels being optimized for multi-core machines… right now it is my understanding that it is only uses one core. I’d also like to see it better use the decrete graphics cards on the platform. I installed Windows Vista. No Aero Glass and most graphics runs painfully slow. I’m not sure on how to get over the technical limitations that a VM abstracts the HW (graphics, network, etc are all soft).
I can tell from my own experiences, that using the MS virtual server is a burden. I switched to VMWare Server first with MS XP as host, now with OpenSusSE 10.2 as host and XP as guest, now everything comes in handy.
Installation is straight and performance is acceptable (2x2GHz DuoCore).
Don’t go for MS Virtual Server, even the installation is pain.