Virtual Windows PCs on Macs

9:24 AM - April 13, 2007 - by Bill Lake

2. Parallels Desktop For Mac: System Requirements

Requirements: Host (Mac) System
Operating Systems Supported Mac OS X 10.4.6 or later
Hardware Requirements
Mac Computer	Support on any 32 or 64-bit Intel-powered iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook, MacBook Pro & Mac Pro Tower.
Processor	Intel Core Solo, Intel Core Duo, Intel Core 2 Duo and Intel Dual-Core Xeon. Full support for Intel Virtualization Technology (VT-x).
Memory	Minimum memory requirements of 512 MB RAM; 1 GB recommended; up to 16 GB
Disk Space:	70 MB of available hard drive space for Parallels Desktop installation plus sufficient space allocated for each virtual machine (15 GB recommended)
Display	16-bit or 32-bit display adapter recommended

One of the biggest advantages of Parallels on OS X is the wide array of guest operating systems that can be used. The following table lists Parallels guest OS options. This extensive list of operating systems should make most IT and power users quite happy.

Requirements: Guest Systems
Guest Operating Systems supported
Microsoft Windows: 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Windows Vista and DOS 6.22 (A validly licensed copy of the OS is required for those versions of Windows that require activation.)
Linux Distributions: SUSE, Red Hat, Debian, Fedora Core, Mandriva, Xandros and more.
Other: FreeBSD, OS/2, eComStation, Solaris, MS-DOS, and OpenBSD 3.8.
Guest Hardware Specifications
Processor	Virtualized Processor of the Host computer.
Motherboard	Generic motherboard compatible with Intel i815 chipset.
Memory	Up to 15 GB RAM available for guest virtual machines. (XP requires 512 MB on boot.)
Keyboard	104-key Windows enhanced keyboard
Mouse	PS/2 wheel mouse.
Display	VGA and SVGA with VESA 3.0 support. (3D Accelerator and Direct X 3D Graphics are not supported in this version.)
IDE Drives	Up to 4 IDE Devices; CD/DVD-ROM Drives, Virtual Hard drives or any combination of the two. Virtual Hard Drive from 20 MB up to 120 GB each.
Floppy Drives	1.44 Floppy drive mapped to FDD image file.
CD Drives	CD/DVD-ROM drives mapped to physical drive or ISO image file. Burn CDs and DVDs directly in virtual machines, play audio CDs, and read data from copy-protected CDs and DVDs.
Sound Card	AC'97-compatible sound card, Sound recording is supported.
Serial Ports	Up to four Serial (COM) Port mapped to a socket or to an output file.
Parallels Ports:	Up to three bi-directional parallel (LPT) ports mapped to output file.
Ethernet Cards	Up to 5 Virtual NIC's. Ethernet virtual network card compatible with RTL8029 bridged to Apple Ethernet or Apple Airport adapter, connected to host-only or shared networking.
USB Ports	USB Support; 8 USB 2.0 ports and 2 USB 1.1 ports;