I'm wondering about the baffling Parallels recommendation (when configuring a VM) that there is a maximum cap of 4 GB of RAM for a VM with Parallels (indeed, it recommends 1.5 GB for Windows 8).

I am using a Late 2011 13' MBP at work with 10.7.5, 2.4 i5, and 8GB of RAM. It has a 500GB spinning disk. I have 4GB of RAM allocated for the VM. When ever I boot it up my MBP just comes to a halt in terms of usuability. Best free music download mac.

Any suggestions (aside from going to an SSD) on how to get this any faster? As a side note, I have a Late 2011 13' MBP with 10.8.3 with a 256GB Samsung 840, and 4GB of RAM, and I basically get the same results, including an overly active fan. I am starting to wonder if the 13' MBPs are not suited for being used to run a VM. What are your experiences, for those of you running a similar setup?

I have an early 2011 13' MBP (2.3 i5) and 8GB ram on a 256gb Samsung SSD. I read somewhere that they recommend only allocating 2GB ram and 1 core to VMs, so that's how I set up Win7 (now on Win8) when I got Parallels 8. I regularly run photoshop/illustrator and MS office, and aside from occasional ramps up when doing something heavy, it generally runs normal, quiet and snappy.

I have absolutely no complaints with performance on this machine. I also used VMWare Fusion 4 prior to Parallels 8 with similar performance (though parallels seems to do better on the battery and it works a bit better on windows 8). I'm going to have to disagree that ram is the problem here, but we don't have much details about what he's doing with the VM and even what OS he's trying to run.

I have 8GB of ram, I'm running photoshop and powerpoint, have a bunch of chrome tabs open, outlook, etc and I'm not having any issues. It's going at 60 degrees celcius. The simplest thing to do here would be to try the 8GB ram in the machine with 4GB ram to see if it's the HDD is causing the slowdowns.

8GB + SSD = there should be no complaints. 4GB is really not enough to run a VM decently, and HDD can cause slowdowns too. I think you're allocating way too much ram to the VM and 4 cores is definitely overkill. If you're running an i5 you only have 2 cores + HT (maybe?). My wife has a mid 2012 13' MBP with an i5, 4 GB of ram and a spinning disk.

She ran a XP vm with 1 GB allocated with no problems for one of her classes that used course content from a CD that had software which only worked properly on OS X 10.6 (rosetta) or less and Windows. In regards to mstsc, you might consider Royal TSX which works pretty well even with NLA rather than running a VM just for remote desktops. With your VM's you should start small on resource allocation and bump it as needed. I think you're overdoing it, especially for what you said you're doing. Just my opinion. Ended up allocating 4 CPU cores to the VM, and all seems to be better than what it was. This is my work computer, so I do not think additional RAM or an SSD will be a viable option as this point due to budget concerns.