Question

Hi Folks,

I am running Vista and OS X natively on a new Mac Pro. Now I am trying to virtualize the natively installed Vista via Parallels 4. I am not planning to migrate Vista into a virtual machine completely, rather I want to use Vista natively when performance does matter and virtually otherwise. I.e. checking if code compiles within Visual Studio (virtually) vs. running extensive performance tests (natively).

My questions:

What happens when I activate Vista a second time for my virtual HW (which seems to be mandatory)? Will the first activation be overwritten or does Vista provide an option for running one installation with several CPUs/Configs (e.g. an installation on an external drive)?

Does anyone has experience with such a native/virtual setup?

Thanks for any answer, hints, comments!

Update: After installing, there were 3 days left for activation. Those days were counted down until the 1 day warning. One day later, the deadline for activation is set back to 3 days. Nice for me, even without understanding the reasons of that behavior. :-)

Answer 1

I didn't get your question, but I run VMWare Fusion and that takes my bootcamp partition and uses it as a Virtual OS, so I can use virtually on my OSX and I can boot directly from it use the full hardware...

Fusion works fine and I only had to install Windows once.

Answer 2

Normally the way to do this is to use seperate hardware profiles. There's a Parallels page that describes how to do so.