Parallels virtualization: great for productivity, bad for mobility

I haven’t talked too much about the MacBook Pro I bought a few weeks back as I’m simply getting my bearings in Mac OS X. Overall, I’m very impressed, but those thoughts will come out here on the blog over time. I wanted to touch upon what I think is the best…and simultaneously, the worst aspect of my initial experience and that’s virtualization. Like a ton of other folks, I downloaded the trial of Parallels Desktop for Mac and was simply amazed at having my favorite Windows apps running on Vista within the Mac. There’s a huge productivity gain for me as I don’t have to learn new apps, but is there a price to be paid for this computing nirvana? Here’s the downer for mobile users that plan to go "virtual": your battery life will greatly suffer.

I know that some of our more technically savvy readers are probably saying, "well duh, that’s because you’re essentially running two computers on a single set of hardware!"; yup, there’s no question why the battery life is greatly reduced. My point however, is to make sure folks consider this aspect if they think a virtual machine is the answer to all of their problems. In most cases, it IS the answer, but you don’t want to overlook the drain on your battery, especially if you’re more mobile than sedentary.

How drastic is the drain? Let’s take a look and see. I just calibrated the battery on the MacBook Pro over the weekend. I just fired up the fully charged notebook a few minutes ago and as I write this post, I have the Bluetooth off and the screen display near the minimum setting; WiFi is on and in use and the only app I’ve opened is my browser (currently Camino). The battery indicator shows about 3 hours and 29 minutes of juice available:

Now, lets fire up Parallels and boot into Vista. Note, I’ve dedicated one-half of the MacBook Pro’s 2 GB of memory to the virtual machine.

Wow, the battery life just dropped to 1 hour and 30 minutes, or by nearly 57%!

Near as I can tell as a Mac n00b, the battery is getting sucked up by the additional RAM and CPU usage. Let’s take a quick peek at both before and after the virtual machine starts up. Here’s a shot of resources just running the Mac OS X environment and Camino:

Here’s the view on the memory in use in the same situation:

Looks like with just a browser open in these conditions, the Intel Core 2 Duo can sleepwalk through the day and the battery requirements are pretty light. Now let’s pop open Parallels and boot into Vista without even running any apps within Vista. Here’s the CPU meter now:

And now the memory usage with Vista running in Parallels:

There’s no question that running the virtual machine will eat up system resources and therefore the battery; that’s a given. Just be sure not to forget that if you plan on running a virtual machine while on the run: you might be running twice as fast with two environments, but you’ll only be running half as far on the same battery charge! ;)

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