6. Pausing Your VM

The ability to pause a VM is a great feature. It allows you to suspend your session at any point by pausing it for hours or days only later picking up right where you left off. This is very advantageous for IT support personnel who want to simulate a work environment or support operating systems that are not native to their current system. So you can walk a user through a Windows NT, 98, Server 2003 or Linux problem just by booting up the VM and getting the exact menus that they are seeing. Another advantage is that you do not have to wait the full boot times as you just restore the system to its previous state. This is because the system is saved as a file.

The saved machine is in the files winxp.sav and winxp.mem.

The suspend feature does not work with Boot Camp created VMs because a Boot Camp installation exists in a real partition. When suspending a VM it will not allow the continuation of some programs, like VPN clients, which rely on real-time connections. However, this is only to be expected and the ability to run multiple OS at once is very nice.

Parallels And Gaming

So you have your VM set up and want to play a game while stuck in a hotel room or other boring place. Well you can play some games but since the VM does not have a dedicated 3D driver to get to the real hardware you're be stuck with very simple games. This issue could be dealt with by providing more direct access to the hardware. However no VM program has yet to do this and it would be very difficult to do. It would also put a greater load on the system.

But, all is not lost. Most of new CPU's and hardware are starting to support Intel's Virtualization Technology or AMD's Virtualization and both promise to allow this level of Virtual Machine in the future but for now Parallels cannot provide a gaming experience equal to that of Boot Camp or any system with even a basic 3D card.

A Bit Of Testing

So what kind of performance can you expect from a Parallels-based Mac?

Performance of the VM systems should be somewhat slower than the native solution in Boot Camp. This proves to be true in some of the tests, but other tests show some interesting results to the contrary. All tests were done multiple times with final values based on averages for multiple runs.

Tests were done in three different "machine" environments:

Boot Camp Native XP: Boot Camp runing XP natively on the MacBook Parallels VM of XP: The VM installation of XP created earlier in this article with all XP updates available from Microsoft Parallels VM of Boot Camp XP: A Parallels VM running an imported version of the Boot Camp partition in number one above