Parallels For Mac Yosemite
Parallels has announced the launch of Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac along with a Mac Enterprise Edition, which supports Apple’s OS X Yosemite, plus brings speed improvements and better battery life. Parallels Desktop has worked fine throughout the beta process for Yosemite, but with the release of Developer Preview 6 on Monday, Parallels no longer opened, reporting that the app was “unable. The Parallels Team is currently supporting Yosemite only on our current version, Parallels Desktop 9, and has not made any Yosemite-related updates to Parallels Desktop 8 at this time. If you do intend to install the Yosemite public beta for testing, your virtual machines and Windows apps will only run on Parallels Desktop 9 at this time.
I was wondering if adding more RAM would help the stalls and poor performance of a mid-2011 iMac. It was working great until I upgraded to Yosemite and the newer Parallels.
Alistair McMillanWindows For Mac Yosemite
2 Answers
If your machine is starved for RAM then it will be swapping pages of memory out to disk.
You can check this whenever you find your Mac stalling and performing poorly by opening Activity Monitor and checking the Memory tab. At the bottom of the window you should see a value labelled 'Swap Used'. If you regularly find a significant value against this then your Mac could likely use more RAM. Ideally you want this to say '0 bytes'.
The coloured Memory Pressure graph can also tell you how efficiently your RAM is being used (i.e. is your Mac constantly having to swap things in or out of RAM). From Activity Monitor Help:
Speaking from personal experience, Parallels (or any software that runs virtual machines) need a lot of RAM to perform well. Of course it depends on how much RAM you are allocating to your virtual machines.
Alistair McMillanAlistair McMillanWindows For Mac Yosemite Compatibility
Speaking generally, adding more RAM gives the operating systems more resources for managing applications in an efficient manner. However, with respect to using Parallels, I'll add the following:
I've used Parallels for a few years now, with both a mid-2012 macbook pro (8 GB RAM), and a 2014 macbook pro (16 GB RAM). As a rule of thumb, you want to share the following evenly between Windows and Mac: CPUs, Memory, and Video Memory.
By equal sharing of resources, neither operating system should be starved of resources, especially when you're using many applications on both systems at the same time.
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We’re all Mac users here, but every once in a while—much as we might hate to admit it—we need to run the odd Windows app. Not only will the latest version of Parallels Desktop, announced on Wednesday, continue to handle that kind of task, but it also brings a host of new features, including increased performance, better integration between guest and host OSes, and support for the forthcoming release of OS X Yosemite.
Parallels has spent a lot of time fine-tuning performance in this newest version, yielding improvements like 30-percent more battery life for MacBook users, 60-percent faster loading of snapshots, 50-percent faster performance from Office 2014 apps, and 48-percent speedier opening of Windows files. The virtualization software will also make better use of both your disk space and memory, using only what it needs of the former (and, thanks to real-time optimization, cleaning up as it goes), and reducing use of the latter by up to 10-percent less.
Improved integration between Windows and OS X is also a highlight of version 10. Users will be able to share information from their Windows VM via the services set up in OS X’s Internet Accounts preference pane, such as Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, and Flickr, as well as Apple’s own sharing options, like email, AirDrop, and Messages. New apps that are installed in Windows will show up in OS X’s Launchpad, and files can be dragged and dropped onto the VM icon in the Dock to bring up Windows—and there’s support for dragging-and-dropping files into virtual machines running OS X as well.
The upcoming release of Yosemite provides Parallels with a number of ways to link the two operating systems too. For example, Windows notifications can show up in Yosemite’s Notification Center, and Windows VMs will support iCloud Drive, iMessages, and SMS text sharing. However, since Yosemite is still in pre-release versions, such support may not be fully implemented yet—rest assured, Parallels does intend to fully support the new version of OS X when it’s officially released this fall.
Enterprise users aren’t left out in the cold, either. Parallels is also updating the Mac Enterprise Edition of Parallels Desktop, bringing the ability for IT managers to support Windows applications for their Mac users, enforce a USB device policy, or allow for encrypted OS X virtual machines using FileVault.
Parallels Desktop 10 is available immediately as a $50 upgrade for current users of Parallels version 8 and 9. It rolls out to new users next week on August 26, though the full version will cost $80. Stay tuned to Macworld for more details on the latest version, including our full review.