My random thoughts on virtualization after 90 days

[kaiserwilhelm]

We put our pinky toe into the water 90 days ago and got into the Parallels world.
Here are some of my thoughts now in case anyone cares to hear.

1. Bought a 24 inch Imac - learned our lesson. Passing that on down to the art
department and getting Mac pros.
2. Ram, Ram, Ram. Our new MacPros will have 10 gig of ram.
3. Make SURE your computer has a second hard drive. Do a complete
backup once a week from drive A to drive b.
Why? Because we found that we were just hitting the thing so hard that
we got little corruptions here and there.
If we had everything on a 2nd drive we could simply boot off drive B,
get on with life, and copy drive b back to a at the end of the day.
(If I had to reinstall IDCS3 one more time...! Or Quark for that matter!
4. We had a LOT of issues with burn in on our 24 inch Imac.
As far as we can tell, it was the Windows side. Should be a whole
different thread, but it was weird.
Again, I would recommend using a MacPro instead of Imac if you
really are going to be doing some heavy Mac / XP intensive stuff.
5. Keep your Mac desktop clean. Why? Because Parallels can use
that desktop as a shared XP / Mac desktop. My experience has been
that if you get messy and leave 40 pdf files on your mac desktop that
parallels does not like that too much.
6. Finally, make XP backups THROUGH Paralells snapshot process
once a week. Pretty cool to be able to go back to where you
stood a week before.
Chris

 

[G_Town]

Re: My random thoughts on virtualization after 90 days

Imacs not have enough cajoneys to run parallels?

 

[kaiserwilhelm]

Re: My random thoughts on virtualization after 90 days

Sorry. Just seeing this.
We started in the Parallels world with an Imac 24 and the max 3 gig of ram.
All I can say is I am SO GLAD I talked the boss into "letting" the art department
have the Imacs and getting us full blown MacPros with 10 gig if ram.
Difference between a ford fusion and a ford mustang 5.0
They both get you there. One just pisses you off along the way.
BTW, we reinstalled CS3 THREE times over 7 weeks on the Imac.
Now, we were running some extra programs in ID3, but it got a little
old.
Parallels did weird things. We had to go back to a previous
XP around 4 times.
NONE of those problems so far with the Mac Pro

 

[neotrog]

Re: My random thoughts on virtualization after 90 days

Can I ask, what are you doing that you need Windows? I run VPC and Parallels on a few machines but it's all administrative tasks on otherwise graphics workstations. Consequently I don't seem to have problems. I was running VPC on a 350MHZ G3, 12" iBook with a 20GB HD and 512MB RAM and Tiger for 2 years( well Panther then Tiger). I wasn't setting any land speed records but I never had any real problems. I had CS3, with some heavy Esko plugins, the WeServer X kit for web development, Office Vx. On the Windows side I was running ERP type stuff that needed ODBC to a MSSQL backend. I only recently got a hand-me-down 1GHZ G4 iBook with 768MB RAM. Parallels freaked when we upgraded to Leopard until I got the 5184 build from the Parallels web site then it settled down again.

Your dead on about the backing up to a second Hard drive. It's just good policy no matter what. It's one of the things that makes Macs beautiful. I will say that I've been OK with grabbing the Windows hard disk image out of the Mac ".dmg" file and have never fussed with windows backups or snapshots. Even on real Win boxes I find the OS to be much more stable when I turn off the restore points feature. Saving the windows state in VPC also caused more funk than it was worth. I think I bagged VPC about 3 times in a year by saving states inadvertently via Shutting down the Mac when VPC was running in the background.

 

[kaiserwilhelm]

Re: My random thoughts on virtualization after 90 days

We are a major letter shop. I am now over the prepress and the data processing.
Suffice it to say, we take text from a Mac and get it into our dp program.
As you may well know, prepress is about 98 percent macs and dp is about 100 percent windows.
So, what do you do? You run parallels on a BEEFY machine and drag and drop and have a good ol time.
The cool thing is that our dp program that we use does something that I have never seen before.
When I export out of Indd CS3 MACINTOSH and bring that into my Windows (running on parallels) the fonts
just magically make it over. It is amazing.
It is a headache sometimes. Just yesterday we decided to start saving into our Windows C drive instead of to the desktop
on parallels.
THEN, we did a snapshot this morning back to yesterday. Whoops - EVERYTHING we did yesterday on the C drive is gone.
Live and learn..