Well, I’ve been playing with Parallels this weekend and have come up with a few pointers for those who are thinking about setting up their machine the same way. Some of it may be evident if you built your setup from scratch, but while the entire VM thing is “tech/geeky” enough as it is already, I don’t think that the people doing these setups are the types to read the manual and are more likely to check blogs and online faqs for help. So here are my two bits for the process.
First, if you want to have all your users able to access Windows without having their own installs for XP chewing space (and arguably licenses as well), install the pvs and hdd files to the /users/shared directory. This way, even guests or limited OSX users will have access to the dark side, and you can enable the guest account on that side as well.
Second, remember that to enable file sharing across the systems, to enable right clicking, bridge networking and screen sizes in windowed and full screen mode, these options are all set on the screen that you setup the VM space on, or the one that you return after Windows exits. For file sharing, you have to define your shared folder to allow files to pass between OSes/file systems. Right clicking, by default seems to be shift-ctrl click, and you can change it under the user interface tab. To enable networking on the Windows side, you should choose “bridging” to allow whatever network interface your Mac is using to be used by Windows as well. I haven’t had any issues with IPs not being picked up, so I have no advice there. The screen modes are also kinda tricky – you have to set the full screen resolution separately from the windowed resolution. I forgot the panel, but while you are doing this, make sure you uncheck the boxes that allow changes in guest resolution (I’m not on my Macbook while making this latest edit).
Lastly, if you can, the easiest way to get this all working nice and quick is to make a master image (copy of the .pvs and .hdd files with everything that you want on the Windows system installed, updated and ready to go) of your Parallels setup and then just copy the files, saving loads of time if you have to install over a number of machines.
I’m going to try the BootCamp/Parallels install this week on the MacBook Pro, and I’ll be sure to post about how that works.
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