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I have a friend who has a 5,5 MBP (I think). He's going to install an SSD in it. Or rather I am. So he wants to take the opportunity to install the latest OS and clean out all the crap accumulated over the years.
He has one hitch. He uses Parallels to run a Windows 7 VM that he has set up JUST SO. My question is will changing anything outside Parallels affect the VM? I didn't think it would since the VM is all self contained. Of course with that said, he'd also have to upgrade to the newest Parallels to run in the latest OS. But again, I figured the VM is still self contained and shouldn't be affected.
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The newer version of Parallels may want to update the VM. Are you going to keep a clone of the old system? You should have a clone on an external drive anyway, in case of disaster.
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Yes. I assured him we'd be keeping his original drive as a source.
So we'd install the SSD and get it up to date and copy over his needed stuff.
Then try to update Parallels and the VMs and see what happens.
Worst case, we'll just erase the SSD and start over and NOT update anything.
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By updating Parallels I am assuming you will be updating to a new version? If so then you will pay for an upgrade and then can download it and install it. It will replace your old version (you will get a new serial number to install) and once you launch W7 it will update Parallels tools to work with the new upgrade. Once all that is done and Parallels is working I would recommend, if not done already, clone the W7 as a backup in case you blow up the original one day. Parallels can do it within the program--we are just talking about the virtual machine. It can be cloned to an external drive if needed. You could clone W7 and do the free upgrade to W10 and have two versions of Windows. I have W10, 8, 7 and even XP. W10 is on is on my main drive. The rest, including the clones I made of them, are on an external drive that I can run them from if needed.
Goes without saying you should also have a clone of the boot drive old before you start and then after you do the upgrade and are satisfied with its operation.
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Yep. I've got all that.
I'm more worried that the process of upgrading to the new version of Parallels will somehow cause some kind of hinkyness in his VM. I suppose I'll just give it a go and see what happens.
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I went through something similar when moving to the version 8 of VMware Fusion. It needed to update the VMs. I didn't run into any problems with them after updating, but I have several copies of each VM in case of problems.
BTW I have found that my VMs run noticeably better now that I can give them a bigger chunk of RAM (on my Mac Pro). Also noticed this when I bumped my MBPs to 16GB and could assign a bigger chunk to VMs.
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bazookaman wrote:
Yep. I've got all that.
I'm more worried that the process of upgrading to the new version of Parallels will somehow cause some kind of hinkyness in his VM. I suppose I'll just give it a go and see what happens.
I've upgraded Parallels several times since I bought the first version. Have had zero problems with all my VM upgrading to match the new version of Parallels. Hopefully it should not be a problem.
