| 2012.11.26 |
I'm pretty impressed!
My wife bought me a copy of Parallels for my birthday. I'd been telling her how
intrigued I was with the idea of using my MBP
as home to both Mac and Windows applications.
Although it took some doing, I finally got a copy of Windows 7 I could use as the
basis for a virtual machine (good luck trying to find it now that Windows 8 has
been released). Even though Win 8 is dirt cheap right now — a copy of the professional-
level upgrade cost only $59 last week — I wasn't confident Visual Studio 2010 would
run under the new OS.
Once the image was in place, I had a few other pieces to add: a lightweight antivirus
solution (I downloaded avast!), SVN, and
VS. Oh — then there was the little matter of the automatic install of 137 operating
system updates. (No WONDER the VM seemed
to run so poorly!)
BUT, I've got the VM up, the solution pulled out of source control and built, and
the first couple of modifications running smoothly.
And for extra credit, there's a mobile version of Parallels available for the iPad.
I could monitor the updates progress of the VM straight from my iPad. That was
pretty sweet!
Is going the VM route better than a dedicated Windows machine? Well, it's
certainly cheaper. There are limitations, however — Parallels will make recommendations
on the maximum amount of memory to be allocated to the VM, so you're limited
primarily by how powerful and spacious the host machine is. My MBP has a
reasonable amount of resources available, but obviously more is better. IMHO,
Parallels did a fantastic job of wiring up its VM's seamlessly — basically I just
created the VM and let Windows install — that was IT. If your idea is to stand up
a temporary machine for a particular task — and testing software compatibility is
ideal for this — then a VM is certainly worth a look, and Parallels makes VM
creation nearly effortless.
I bought the Switch to Mac edition of Parallels Desktop (link below), which contains
a USB cable as well as the software. This edition is fantastic for creating a VM of
an existing Windows machine. My Vista-based desktop is way too large to cram onto my
MacBook, so that wasn't an option for me at this point, but could come in handy later.
Then last night I blew $5 on the Parallels Mobile app (link below) that let me hook
into the VM on the MBP. I wouldn't say it's ideal for doing actual coding, but it
seems fine for pointy-clicky work. And at the introductory price of $4.99, well,
I just couldn't pass it up.
Links:
Parallels Desktop 8 - Switch to Mac Edition
Parallels Mobile
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