Virtual machines for CRIMPers

Posted by Paul Korm
Feb 25, 2016 at 04:29 PM

I run a Windows 10 VM on my Mac Book Air, under Parallels 11. It’s up and active about 10 hours a day, and has been for years. Generally stable. It is a full-fledged Windows instance—I run Office 2016, MS Project, Visio, ConnectedText, OneNote, Outlook and numerous other apps concurrently, and the VM is running along side everything I have going on the OS X side (OS X 10.11.3)—usually Mail, DEVONthink, Curio, Tinderbox, TheBrain 2Do, and a couple dozen menubar apps, and several other things. In other words, this is always a very busy machine and it’s a real benefit to having two simultaneous environments. The Windows VM is almost always VPN’d into a client. Parallels is configured to let Mac recognize and use Windows apps, and vice versa. The only thing (no great loss) is that custom URLs on the Mac side are not recognized by Windows—an esoteric thing of no consequence.

So yes, real work goes on LOL. I have never had a memory issue—the MBA has 8 GB RAM and 500 GB SSD—which is managed as virtual RAM.

Simon wrote:
Due to the too often version upgrade from Parallels, I’ve opted for
>VMware Fusion, which works very well. I only use the VM to mess about.
>Does anyone use VM’s for serious work? I have often been tempted by
>Connected Text, but wondered how cumbersome it would be to have apps in
>Mac and Windows and how the cross pollination would work.
> >Anyone seriously using Mac and Windows in a VM environment and does it
>work?