Virtualization on OSX

I'm about to go on the road again and I've been getting my laptop updated to make sure I can function without internet access. For me that means that I need a linux environment. I've been using Parallels for this because it was the only option when I first got my macbook, and I'm not terribly impressed with its ability to run linux virtual machines.

First I have to say that my preferred usage for vms is to disable as much graphical UI as possible and login using the terminal; I want to avoid any excess resource usage because I'm on a laptop and I want better battery life.

Here's my gripe list:

• poweroff spins the cpus up to 100% or more utilization and doesn't actually power the machine off.
  The reason? ACPI is only supported for vista guests. I'm rather bemused by this statement, because the whole point of ACPI is to virtualize certain types of hardware access--it should not be targeted to a particular OS.
• Parallels Tools requires X to run.
  You can manually run the daemon but it spins the CPU trying to open the display. This means that you can't get time synchronization with the host unless you want to load your CPU
• Shared folder performance sucks
  Mounting the host filesystem over NFS is faster, but kernel panics OSX (the latter is probably an OSX bug)

Outside of these issues, it's not bad though. I'm rather disappointed about the level of Linux support from Parallels--I had all the same problems a year ago and nothing seems to have changed. It's clear that their priority is in making the Windows VM experience nice and integrated, and that's their perogative.

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Syndicated 2008-07-19 15:39:41 from Evil, as in Dr.