Running Parallels Desktop for Mac in Headless Mode

 General Technology  3 Responses »
Feb 042010
 

(This is a local mirror posting of the guest blog piece I wrote for Parallels Consumer Tech Blog.)

I made a fortuitous discovery with Parallels Desktop v5 for Mac overnight. I had been patching my Mac Pro, and thought one of the patches was going to need a reboot, so of course I shutdown Parallels. After the patching was completed, it turned out I didn’t need to reboot, and I got distracted so I never got back around to launching Parallels.

Last night I needed to check something on one of my Linux virtual machines that I run in Parallels Desktop, and rather than use screen sharing to my Mac Pro, I pulled out my handy iPhone application for Parallels, jumped into the virtual machine list and turned the Linux guest on. 10 seconds or so later I was able to ssh into it, do what I needed to do, then didn’t think about it again.

I came back to my Mac Pro this morning and again logged onto the Linux virtual machine via ssh, and ran a bunch of tests without once noticing: Parallels Desktop for Mac was not running. I’m not saying that the virtual machine window wasn’t visible – the application itself wasn’t running, the console for my virtual machine wasn’t running, and the virtual machine was happily chugging away.

Here you can see my dock showing that Parallels isn’t running:

Parallels Desktop

So, is this good or bad? I have to say it falls into the category of sheer awesome.

If you run multiple virtual machines in Parallels – particularly if you’re running a bunch of Linux virtual machines, being able to go headless is really useful. You don’t end up with so many windows (minimised or otherwise) cluttering up the desktop, and you can still access the virtual machines just how you want.

So in order to run virtual machines headless, you’re going to need the iPhone Parallels application, which means you’ll need an iPhone. (But we all have one of those, right? :-) )

Once you’ve got the iPhone application for Parallels installed, and connected to your Parallels Desktop system, you can quit Parallels and use the iPhone application to start and stop virtual machines:

Parallels Desktop iPhone Application

Obviously this doesn’t give you the full flexibility of running the Parallels application completely, but if you’re only wanting to run virtual machines without a console, or you just need to quickly fire up a single virtual machine regardless of whether Parallels is running or not, using the Parallels iPhone application can be a real time saver.

 Posted by Preston de Guise at 07:40  Tagged with: , ,

…And why I’ll stick to Parallels

 General Technology  4 Responses »
Dec 092009
 

So in an earlier post, I mentioned that I’d been looking at first comparisons between VMware Fusion 3.0 and Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac, and I thought it was time to follow-up with longer term impressions.

To be blunt, VMware Fusion 3 is unpolished and unpleasant to use on an almost continual basis. I’ll keep it around for only two reasons: (a) so I can run ESX/vSphere within a VM for testing purposes, and (b) I can periodically play with the demo/test images provided by EMC for particular products that won’t convert into Parallels images.

So what’s there to dislike about Fusion?

  • Unity. It’s like someone at VMware declared “Make it slow. Make it inefficient. Make it periodically take 10+ seconds to redraw windows. Make it work but glitchy enough that it makes the user grind their teeth in frustration.” Well, if someone did decree that as a product feature, they did a remarkably good job of achieving it. Here’s a tip, folks at VMware: Buy a copy of Parallels and see how professionals do an integrated windowing feature. Unity in Fusion v3 is worse than Coherence when it was first introduced (which was fine) – i.e., you have a long, long way to go.
  • Import another VM. What VM would you like to import? Parallels? Forget it. Why offer to import VMs from Parallels if every VM comes in unusable? (I’m sure other people must have better experiences than this, but I’m certainly not impressed.)
  • Performance. OK, so VMware Fusion performance isn’t atrocious – it’s actually OK. However, I’d been led to believe that VMware Fusion kicked Parallels Desktop out of the ballpark when it came to performance. I’ve not seen anything to indicate that it exceeds the performance of Parallels, and so I see that as a negative.
  • Quit. Don’t pester me, just suspend my VM.

As I said, I’ll be keeping Fusion around, but only for those situations where I can’t use Parallels.

 Posted by Preston de Guise at 05:25  Tagged with: , , , ,

Aside – Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac OS X

 Aside  No Responses »
Nov 132009
 

I’ve been using Parallels Desktop for the Mac for several years now – in fact, when I originally started using it, VMware were only talking about doing a desktop virtualisation product for the Mac.

That’s partly why I stay loyal to Parallels – they supported the platform sooner. The other reason is that after years of hearing tripe from VMware employees about why you couldn’t mix windows from both operating systems, Parallels went ahead and did it with Coherence. (Yes, VMware Fusion’s Unity functionality went there too, around the same time, but the amount of times I heard it wasn’t a feature they were interested in within Workstation, as an example, drove me nuts.)

So when Parallels Desktop v5 for the Mac came out, I jumped on the upgrade bandwagon. It’s given me one major positive – I can now run Solaris 10 AMD 64-bit on my Mac Pro; that was the one remaining OS I absolutely need to periodically run that I was being blocked from doing previously. After about 3 days of installing, reinstalling, downloading more recent versions of Solaris 10 AMD, I even finally managed to get networking operational within the VM too, which meant it was useful.

Other than that, Parallels v5 has been a bit of a disappointment. You see, currently for me, Coherence mode only works if I’ve got a single monitor attached to my machine. The only time that happens is when I’m using my laptop away from my desk, or when I’m traveling – and those are times I’m less likely to run VMs. Since Coherence doesn’t work for me 99% of the time, that means I can’t really try out the Crystal mode – though I’ll admit, I’m unlikely to use it heavily; I dislike the “shared apps” approach offered by Parallels, and the new Crystal view mode seems to rely heavily on this.

It does continue to annoy me that I don’t have the option of virtually turning the monitor off – why can’t I close the console for a running VM? Surely that’s not so huge a thing that it can only be limited to enterprise class virtualisation – aka ESX, VMware Server or Parallels Server. When you have 10+ VMs running at once, even minimised all those consoles start to get annoying.

While overall I’m pretty happy with Parallels performance in terms of memory and CPU, recent support cases have highlighted to me that when it comes to translated IO, Parallels struggles – it seems to peak at about 20MB/s per VM, regardless of the throughput capabilities of the attached device. I first noticed that under v4, and was unhappy to see no change in v5.

If you’re currently a Parallels Desktop for Mac user, and you haven’t yet upgraded, I’d suggest holding off until the next build of v5, rather than jumping into the initial build released. Hopefully by then they’ll at least have Coherence reliably working again.

[Edit, 2009-11-14]

I’d like to take back my comments about Parallels 5 still having mediocre IO performance. I just realised, a short while ago, that one of the VMs I’d been testing with had failed in its VMware Tools update. Now, with both VMs in this particular test config updated to Parallels Tools v5, instead of getting 14-17MB/s transfer speed between them as I’d been getting under Paralles v4, I’m now getting 45-57MB/s. Now that’s a performance improvement.

 Posted by Preston de Guise at 05:27  Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Lessons I've recently learned…

 Basics, General thoughts, NetWorker  No Responses »
Nov 112009
 

When I was at University, a philosophy lecturer remarked rather sagely that University is the last place people can go to learn for the sake of learning.

That’s sort of correct, but not always so. People can fumble through their jobs on a day to day basis learning what they have to, but they can also work along the basis of trying to soak up as much information as they can along the way. I’m not always a knowledge sponge – particularly if my caffeine quota is on the light side for the day, but I like to think I learn the odd thing here and there.

In the spirit of knowledge acquisition, here’s a few smaller things I’ve learned recently:

  • When simulating network connectivity problems, there’s a big difference between yanking the network cable and shutting down the network interface. (I was doing the interface shutdown, another person was doing the network cable unplug – and our results didn’t correlate.) Lesson: When escalating a case to vendor support, always spell out how you’re simulating the “comms failure” a customer is having.
  • The ‘bigasm’ utility starts to fall in a heap and becomes extremely unreliable once you exceed about 2100 GB of data generated for a single file. Lesson: When setting out to generate 2.3+ TB of backup data, create a bunch of files and have a bigasm directive to generate a smaller amount of data per file.
  • When setting up tests that will take a couple of days to run, always triple check what you’re about to do before you start it. Lesson: If you make a typo of 250 files at 100 GB each instead of 250 files at 10 GB each, bigasm/NetWorker won’t interpolate what you really meant.
  • There’s a hell of a difference between Solaris 10 AMD release 2 and release 8. Lesson: If wanting to get a Solaris 10 AMD 64-bit OS working in Parallels Desktop for Mac v5 with networking, go for release 8. It will save many forehead bruises.
  • ext3 is about as “modern” a filesystem as I am an elite sportsperson. Lesson: If wanting to achieve decent operational activities with backup to disk under Linux, use XFS instead of ext3.
  • All eSATA is not created equal. Lesson: When using an motherboard SATA -> eSATA converter, make sure the dual drive dock you order doesn’t work as a port multiplier.
 Posted by Preston de Guise at 15:32  Tagged with: , , , ,

Aside – On second thoughts, escalate that please

 Aside  No Responses »
Jul 142009
 

I use Parallels quite a lot within my Mac environment, and recently tried to get Solaris/AMD 64-bit installed. Even on a Mac Pro system Solaris stubbornly refuses to install in 64-bit mode, picking the 32-bit kernel every time.

So after exhausting a lot of search options, I submitted a case to Parallels support – titled:

“Solaris installer does not recognise 64-bit CPU”

Overnight, I got the first email back from Parallels support, with this response:

Escalating this ticket to our next level of Support since the issue is regarding Linux.

I half-typed an email response to correct the engineer, but then I thought better of it. If I need to explain that Solaris isn’t Linux to a support engineer, then on second thoughts, I’d prefer to have my case escalated to an engineer who (hopefully) already knows this.

[2009-07-15 Edit]

The second level support engineer I got was much more savvy in the differences between operating systems and was able to answer my question. Solaris 64-bit Parallels support is being actively worked on, so hopefully I’ll see release notes for an update to the current version “soon” (my words, not theirs) mentioning added support for Solaris 64-bit guests.

[2009-12-30 Edit]

Parallels Desktop v5 does seem much better at supporting 64-bit Solaris. There’s a few tricks to getting networking going, but nothing terrible.

 Posted by Preston de Guise at 10:37  Tagged with: , ,
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