Parallels Desktop for Mac

Parallels Desktop for Mac (formerly Parallels Workstation for Mac OS X) is a virtualization software for Mac OS X on Intel processors by Parallels.

Overview

As the host operating system is Mac OS X is supported as guest operating systems, a variety of 32- bit operating systems, version 6 also 64-bit, for x86 support ( as Windows, Linux, * BSD, OS / 2, Solaris/86 or Mac OS X Lion ). As of version 7 for the first time also the support of Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion ) has been integrated as a guest operating system. You can recover, inter alia, directly from a Recovery HD partition and OS X Lion puts forward as the host OS. If the user has a Windows installed on a Boot Camp partition, it can be executed directly in Parallels ' virtual machine. Similarly, physically separate Windows installations can be transported in its own image format, then run this in a virtual machine.

Emulated environment

The emulated environment provides, inter alia,

• A VESA 3.0 compliant graphics card ( up to 1024 MB VRAM configurable)
• An Intel i815 -compatible chipset,
• USB 2.0 support (including iSight HD support ),
• An AC97 compatible sound card
• And a compatible Realtek (RTL8029 (AS) ) network card.

In addition, you can burn CDs and DVDs in the VM by directly accessing the hardware of the host system.

Parallels also has a coherence mode ( called by VMWare Unity Mode and VirtualBox seamless mode), which ensures that the guest desktop will disappear and resurface the guest applications in the Mac environment. This allows you to start guest programs from the Dock in Mac OS X.

Drag and drop data can be exchanged between a Mac OS X host and a Windows guest exchange without using explicit sharing.