Parallels 5 (OS X)/Windows 7/Revit 2010 -

[iru69]

We’re looking for settings to maximize performance of Revit 2010/Windows 7/Parallels 5/OS X (Leopard/Snow Leopard)

I’ve suggested a number of settings. Try them, tweak them, post back on how things are working on your setup.

There are three main parts: Parallels settings, Windows settings and Revit settings.

PARALLELS 5 SETTINGS

VIEW MODES:

There are several view modes for how far Parallels integrates with OS X (Parallels menu bar>View). I've indicated the performance for each mode.

Window: Fast.
Crystal: Slowest?
Coherence: Slow.
Full Screen: Fastest, very slight edge over Window mode?
Modality: Useless? (edit: gordon found a neat use for it: to keep an eye on rendering progress)

While the Crystal and Coherence view modes are obviously cool and make using Windows a more aesthetically pleasing and integrated experience, a fairly noticeable performance penalty may come with it.

VIRTUAL MACHINE CONFIGURATION:

GENERAL:

Processors: If you have a Dual Core, select 1 processor. If you have a Quad Core or better, select 2 processors.

Main memory: As much as you can spare, but don’t overdo it if it’s not needed. OS X needs a minimum of 1GB for itself, but will be happier with 2GB. If you have 4GB of RAM installed, try 2GB for the Windows VM. If you have 6GB+ of RAM installed, try 4GB (or more as needed) for the Windows VM. You can monitor your Mac’s memory usage using the OS X Activity Monitor. You can monitor your Window’s memory usage using the Windows Task Manager. Keep in mind that Windows will still have access to virtual memory even if you can’t allocate huge amounts of RAM to your Windows VM.

OPTIONS:

Optimization:
Disable Enable Adaptive Hypervisor.
Disable Enable AutoCompress.
Enable Tune Windows for speed.
Optimize performance for: Virtual machine.
Power consumption: Better performance.

Services:
Use MacLook – This basically installs an OS X desktop theme on Windows (pretty cool!). Personal preference whether to enable; I couldn’t perceive any performance hit with it enabled.

Security:
Isolate Mac from Windows. This will completely isolate your Windows VM from your Mac – no shared folders, etc. Good to do if you can work that way, but I want to keep my Revit project files in my OS X project folder.

Shared Folders:
Share these Mac folders: Personal preference, but I set it to none, and manually added my Projects folder as a shared folder.

User-defined Mac OS X folders: Personal preference - I added my “Projects” folder. It’s kind of the equivalent of mapping a network drive in Windows – your folder will appear as a “drive” under the Computer list in Windows. This will make it easily accessible from within Revit.

Disable Access Windows folders from Mac. No (noticeable) harm in leaving this enabled, but it just clutters up OS X and not much point in it if you’re keeping all your data files in OS X (versus keeping them within the Windows VM).

Shared Profile:
Disable Enable Shared Profile. This is the big one – turn OFF Enable Shared Profile – this appears to be what’s causing Revit to stall when attempting file operations (Open, Load, etc.).

Shared Applications:
Disable Share Windows applications with Mac OS X. Disable this if you’re not using Crystal or Coherence view modes – it’s just a waste of system resources.

Disable Share Mac OS X applications with Windows. This one in particular is pointless (enables opening OS X apps from the Windows Start Menu). (Edit: as Josh pointed out in his post, not pointless for certain Windows apps.)

SmartMount:
Enable SmartMount. Personal preference - I'm on the fence, but turned if off for now because it’s annoying to see every OS X drive showing up in Windows, and that can only cause problems. Any Shared Folders (see above) will still be accessible even if SmartMount is disabled. However, if it's disabled, if you want to use a drive in Windows (such as a USB flash drive), you’ll need to eject it in OS X and then connect to it to your Windows VM (Parallels Menu Bar>Devices>device you want to connect to). Up to you which is more annoying.

Crystal & Coherence:
Enable Turn off Aero theme in Coherence.
Enable Disable drop shadow.
We can’t afford the eye candy.

Full Screen:
Disable Use all displays in full screen. It’s a mess on my machine, YMMV.

Gestures & Apple Remote:
Leave them on if you need them, turn them off if you don’t.

HARDWARE

Boot Order:
Disable CD/DVD; Floppy Disk; Network Adapter. We’re only booting from the C: drive.

Video:
Video memory: 128MB or 256MB. Shouldn’t make much of a difference - video memory is not very important to Revit.

Disable Enable 3D acceleration (as in turn it off). I noticed a fairly hefty Revit/Windows VM performance drop with it enabled. Since we’ve disabled hardware acceleration in Revit and would have disabled Windows Aero anyway, there’s no point in having it enabled. If you do want to use HWA in Revit, you’ll need to have this enabled.

WINDOWS 7 SETTINGS

Adjust for best performance:
Control Panel>System>Advanced System Settings>Performance Settings>Visual Effects tab>Performance Settings>Adjust for best performance. While the UI eye candy is nice to look at, it doesn’t help Revit.

Turn off System Restore:
Control Panel>System>Advanced System Settings>System Protection tab>Configure…>Turn off system protection. We don’t need it for a VM and it just slows things down and takes up disk space.

Turn off File Indexing:
Right-click C: drive>Properties>General Tab>Disable Allow files on this drive...>Apply changes to drive C:\, subfolders and files. Also make sure that Compress this drive to save disk space is disabled as well.

Anti-Virus Software:
Do not install anti-virus software if at all possible. Anti-virus software is notorious for system slowdowns. If you practice safe-computing, you don’t need it anyway.

REVIT OPTIONS SETTINGS

Graphics:
Disable Use Hardware Acceleration. This just seems to make things slower, if it doesn’t crash Revit altogether.
Disable Use Anti-Aliasing for 3D views. Can’t afford the performance penalty.

ViewCube:
Inactive opacity: 100%.
Disable Snap to closest view.
Disable Use animated transition when switching views.
Can't say that any of those make a difference, but eliminating transparency effects and animated transitions can't hurt.

If you don’t regularly use the ViewCube and/or SteeringWheel (navigation bar), turn them off: Ribbon>View>User Interface.

[ford347]

I’ve suggested a number of settings. Try them, tweak them, post back on how things are working on your setup.

Iru69, thank you for posting this! It really helped me out on my end, especially since this is the exact setup I am running on.

I followed nearly every step and by doing this, it resolved all of my performance issues.

Shared Profile:
Disable Enable Shared Profile. This is the big one – turn OFF Enable Shared Profile – this appears to be what’s causing Revit to stall when attempting file operations (Open, Load, etc.).

This is an important step as stated. My biggest issue was the file operations freezing up the computer and or Revit. I found that it would actually crash the Finder. After freezing, I could not access the files within the mapped drives within the finder, causing me to have to log out of both the VM and the Mac to access them again.

Adjust for best performance:
Control Panel>System>Advanced System Settings>Performance Settings>Visual Effects tab>Performance Settings>Adjust for best performance. While the UI eye candy is nice to look at, it doesn’t help Revit.

The only thing I've done different here is use a custom setting. I left the following checked:

-Animate controls and elements inside windows
-Show window contents while draggin
-Smooth edges of screen fonts
-Smooth-scroll list boxes

I'm actually not sure what every one of these items do, but it was a compromise between appearance and performance. After checking those items, there was not a noticeable performance hit.

Services:
Use MacLook – This basically installs an OS X desktop theme on Windows (pretty cool!). Personal preference whether to enable; I couldn’t perceive any performance hit with it enabled.

I used the Mac look for a while. I liked it ok, by ended up switching it back off because it caused a small issues in Quickbooks running on Windows. No performance hit from leaving it on as far as I could tell.

Disable Share Mac OS X applications with Windows. This one in particular is pointless (enables opening OS X apps from the Windows Start Menu).

I actually have a need for this come to find out. I use an online construction project management application that only works with Internet Explorer that exports forms, reports, etc. to a number file types, one of them being Microsoft Word. Since I have switched to the Mac Office Suite, without this enabled, Internet Explorer and Windows does not know which program to use to open the file with. With this option enabled however, since Mac Apps are shared with the Windows system, I am able to open the Word doc on Mac Office from a Windows application. Not everyone will need this however.

Crystal & Coherence:
Enable Turn off Aero theme in Coherence.
Enable Disable drop shadow.
We can’t afford the eye candy.

I am using Windows in Coherence and it is working for me right now with no large performance hit. I use a number of Windows apps and this makes it nice to have them integrated with the Mac OS.

I have moved my financial software, a software used to communicate between my online PM app and Quickbooks, Revit, a mail program and Acrobat Extended to the new VM on the Mac and everything is working well. After changing my settings listed in this post, I felt comfortable enough to move all of these things over from my PC to the new Mac.

Again, thanks for the settings and I hope to see others post their results. If anything changes on my end, I'll be sure to post an update.

Josh

[ron.sanpedro]

Window: Fast.
Crystal: Slowest?
Coherence: Slow.
Full Screen: Fastest, very slight edge over Window mode?
Modality: Useless.

My sense is you are dead on about speeds. I use Full Screen almost exclusively, on the 23" monitor. The laptop screen still has OS X showing. I do like Modality for monitoring a rendering in process.

Gordon

[iru69]

This is a companion post to the original Parallels 5 post. I wanted to examine the settings for VMware’s Fusion 3 to maximize performance.

These settings seemed to work best for my computer, but obviously YMMV. Would be great to hear what others are finding work best on their setups.


FUSION 3

VIEW MODES
Window; Unity; Full Screen: I kept switching between all three modes, and I couldn’t really perceive a noticeable difference. Maybe Full Screen mode is a tad faster than Window mode which is a tad faster than Unity, but it’s a really close call. Very subjective, but I’ll actually suggest that the graphics were smoothest in Unity mode. I noticed more of a difference between view modes in Parallels.

Use All Displays in Full Screen: It doesn’t quite work right on my machine (it looks okay, but I can’t fully drag windows onto the second display).

PREFERENCES:

General:
Enable Gaming: Never optimize mouse for games. The “optimization” reeks havoc with Revit (for instance, set to Automatic, as soon as the mouse cursor touched the ViewCube, the cursor would inexplicably slow to a crawl).

Keyboard & Mouse:
Key Mappings: This may be important if you’ve made changes to the default Mac keyboard settings. For instance, the Apple Command key is equivalent to the Windows Control key – since I switch back and forth between using Windows at the office and a Mac at home, I like to have the Command key mapped to the Control key on my keyboard. This way, I always use the Control key for common keyboard shortcuts like Cut/Copy/Paste, etc, whether I’m using Windows or Mac. However, the keyboard mapping in OS X gets reversed again in the VM. By default, when I would press the Control key, the VM thought I was pressing the Windows key. So using the Key Mappings settings, I can map it back. Sound confusing? It is! In my case, I enabled Enable Key Mappings and set the Mac Shortcut Command key to the Virtual Machine Shortcut Control key.

(p.s. Parallels has the same issue, and can similarly be fixed using it’s Keyboard & Mouse Preference settings)

Mouse Shortcuts: Personal preference, but since I’m using a multi-button mouse, I disabled Secondary Button and Button 3.

Mac OS Shortcuts and Fusion Shortcuts: Personal preference – my head’s still spinning on the Key Mappings, so I’ve left these alone for the time being.

SETTINGS:

Sharing:
Share folders on your Mac: Personal preference - I manually added my Projects folder as a shared folder.

Mirrored Folders:
Do not enable any Mirrored Folders (I didn’t check each one individually?). This appears to cause Revit to stall (or even crash) when attempting file operations (Open, Load, etc.), similar to the Profiles issue in Parallels 5.

Processors & RAM:
Processors: If you have a Dual Core, select 1 processor. If you have a Quad Core or better, select 2 processors.

Main memory: As much as you can spare, but don’t overdo it if it’s not needed. OS X needs a minimum of 1GB for itself, but will be happier with 2GB. If you have 4GB of RAM installed, try 2GB for the Windows VM. If you have 6GB+ of RAM installed, try 4GB (or more as needed). You can monitor your Mac’s memory usage using the OS X Activity Monitor. You can monitor your Window’s memory usage using the Windows Task Manager. Keep in mind that Windows will still have access to virtual memory even if you can’t allocate huge amounts of RAM to your Windows VM.

Display:
Disable Accelerate 3D Graphics. I perceived a fairly hefty Revit/Windows VM performance drop with it enabled. Since we’ve disabled hardware acceleration in Revit and would have disabled Windows Aero anyway, there’s no discernible point in having it enabled. If you do want to use HWA in Revit, you’ll need to have this enabled.

REMOVABLE DEVICES:

Hard Disks:
For disk size, I set it to 40GB, but used the Split into 2 GB files option rather than pre-allocating the disk space. I don’t think this affects general Revit performance, but it might have an impact on open/save speeds or even Windows itself in uncommon circumstances (e.g. a large pagefile)? I'd figure about 20GB for W7, a 4GB pagefile, and Revit 2010 - so I'd guess 30GB is about as small as you'd want to go.

I notice there’s a Disk Cleanup button which might be one to keep an eye on if you notice any degradation in hard drive performance while using the VM (mine currently indicates a disk cleanup is not required).

[iru69]

Parallels 5 vs. Fusion 3 vs. Native Benchmarks.

I also wanted to include Sun VirtualBox, but I wasn’t able to get Windows 7 working on it correctly (and didn’t want to spend the time troubleshooting it), so I gave up for now.

I did a few very simple benchmarks comparing performance between Parallels, Fusion and native Windows (i.e. sans a VM). Nothing scientific, just a stop watch: Starting Windows, opening Revit, opening a 60MB project file, rendering a view, and changing a material. I did each test a couple times. Parallels tended to be faster than Fusion by a few seconds, but, subjectively speaking, nothing really perceivable in practice. Native Windows is noticeably more snappy.

My Computer: 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad / 8GB RAM (4GB for OS X Leopard & 4GB for Windows VM) / Nvidia 9600 GT / Windows 7 / RAC 2010.

Start Windows 7:
Parallels: 55 sec.
Fusion: 61 sec.
Native: 40 sec.

Start Revit 2010:
Parallels: 69 sec.
Fusion: 71 sec.
Native: 52 sec.

Open 60MB Project File:
Parallels: 37 sec.
Fusion: 40 sec.
Native: 25 sec.

Render View:
Parallels: 1 hr 14 min.
Fusion: 1 hr 15 min.
Native: n/a (uses all 4 cores, so not comparable)

Change Material:
Parallels: 32 sec.
Fusion: 35 sec.
Native: 27 sec.

File operations are where things lag the most compared to native Windows. The Change Materials benchmark, relying strictly on the CPU, shows less of a difference.

However, whether you wait 30 seconds or 40 seconds to change materials is probably not what’s most critical. What is most critical is what I’m not able to benchmark here, and that’s how snappy (or sluggish) Revit feels when doing moment to moment tasks. Does Revit feel snappy when changing Ribbon tabs, or selecting an element, or changing views, or moving a view around on a sheet? Those are things that will really determine the satisfaction level of using a Windows VM on OS X.

Running Revit on native Windows, Revit is just all-around snappier and more pleasant to use (though noticeably a smudge slower than my 3GHz Core 2 at work). Another thing to keep in mind is that my hardware is getting a bit long-in-the-tooth... a faster CPU would likely help with the VM sluggishness on my setup. I think most of this comes down to CPU - if you have a fast enough CPU, the sluggishness may not be noticeable.

Which is best: Parallels 5 or Fusion 3? I tried out Parallels 4 and Fusion 2 a while back and went with Fusion because it seemed more stable on my setup and supported Wx64 (which Parallels did not at the time). Between P5 and F3, they each have their neat tricks and their unfortunate quirks. P5 is “slicker” than F3, and it’s “suspend” state is much faster than F3 (at least on my computer). The “benchmarks” show P5 to be slightly faster (and I believe benchmarks other sources on the web have shown that as well), but it doesn’t translate to perceivable performance with Revit as far as I can tell. I’d actually say, subjectively, that F3 feels a tad snappier than P5. F3 still feels a little more stable and a little less quirky in my limited experience with P5. One big thing is that after upgrading Revit 2010 to the SAP (SP3?), Revit isn’t “zooming” properly in P5 using the scroll wheel (no idea if this is a Revit bug or a P5 bug). Since I’ve already paid for the Fusion 3 upgrade, I’ll stick with it for now. But for anyone trying to decide, I’d suggest downloading both and test drive them for yourself.

Bottom-line for my setup is that while it’s fine for occasional use when I want to work from home, I think I’d be frustrated with it full-time.

For those contemplating using a Mac to run Revit in a VM full-time, but are concerned performance is going to be frustrating, it’s a really tough question to answer without experiencing it first-hand. What different users find acceptable performance is quite relative. If you have your heart set on a Mac, I’d strongly suggest finding a good friend with a newish/new Mac who will let you install a VM (if they haven’t already) and Revit and see for yourself. As of this writing, if I was buying a new Mac to use Revit, I’d be looking at an iMac/Mac Pro with either the 2.8GHz i7/3GHz Core 2 (or better) or a 3GHz MacBook Pro.

(somewhat of a side note, but just to be forthright about exactly what kind of Mac I have: my home computer is setup as a “Hackintosh” - I run OS X natively on off-the-shelf PC hardware. I don’t use the term “BootCamp” when running Windows natively (since I’m technically not using BootCamp), but it’s essentially the same thing. I’ve been using Fusion with Windows 7 (beta) for a little over six months)

[ford347]

A small update for those of you running on Parallels 5, Windows 7 x64.

I have had a few networking problems over the past few weeks. I have several network drives that I connect to at start-up on the Mac, and those same drives mapped in W7. Over the past few weeks, I keep losing my connection to those drives on the Mac side. To give an example of my troubles, I have Acrobat Extended installed on the Windows side. Every file type of .pdf is set to open from the Mac with this Windows application. This has not been working either. Windows would state I had a networking problem and afterwords, my connection to those drives were lost on the Mac.

I FINALLY!!!!!!!!! got through to Parallels support and they had me change the following:

Parallels
-Virtual Machine
-Configure
-Network Adapter 1
Choose -Default Adapter- in lieu of 'shared networking'.

This seems to have fixed these problems and a few others. So as long as it stays that way, I'm very happy that got resolved.

As aside, I'm curious to know if anyone else out there has had to deal with the Parallels support "system"? Since I got my new Mac several weeks ago, I have tried to initiate support chat about 20-30 times, every time failed. I've tried to call the phone number about 15-20 times, every time entering in all the appropriate information to find myself on hold for an average of 2.5-3 minutes (no big), and the hung up on .....consistently..... I then tried email one time and received a response back in four days after the problem had already been solved. Today however, after 6 failed attempts, I finally got through to them, which was great, but it was a long road just to get some help.

Josh

[klwhiteley]

Thanks for this thread. Helped me set up Revit on my iMac on Windows 7 + Parallels with almost no problems. I had one problem that is really a Parallels 5 problem but thought it might interest people looking into this set up and that both times I tried installing Parallels Internet Security (provided by Kaspersky) that comes with Parallels it started crashing Windows, but now I'm just operating without internet security and mostly using the Mac OS for internet.

Mostly I've had to fly around to forums to all over for each of these programs to figure out how they work. It was great to get all the settings you provided here for each of these interacting programs. I hope you'll check out this thread I started in the "coffee without CAD" forum about working in and switching between the Mac and Windows platforms together. I would be very grateful for any insights you might have on that topic.

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=113107

cheers,
k.

[iru69]

Just a couple follow-up notes on my setup and Fusion.

Fusion 3.1 came out a few weeks back and offers a noticeable performance boost over 3.0. Direct3D performance is improved. On my setup, I was able to enable Fusions 3D acceleration and turn Revit 2011's hardware acceleration on with no ill effects (quite the opposite - graphic performance improved greatly). Everything seemed noticeably more snappy on my older Core 2 Quad 2.4GHz CPU. Particularly nice is that 1,2,4, or 8 cores are supported within the VM... so those who have dual quad core Mac Pros can dedicate 4 cores cores to the VM. It's a free upgrade for those already on Fusion 3, and definitely worth the upgrade cost for those still using Fusion 2.

Also, I upgraded my "hackintosh" to a Core i7-870 (2.93GHz) / 8GB RAM (still have the nvidia 9600GT). Really makes a difference for the VM. I'm a bit spoiled now because I've been using a Dell at work with identical CPU, RAM and OS (W7x64) for a few weeks now, so there's still no comparing the VM to running Revit in native Windows. There's just something about it that's not quite as snappy - it's a split second here and there, though it's quite workable in my opinion, especially for occasional work. However, I think it would start to bug me working full time in a VM, but a lot of it might depend on what you can compare it to. At least with my particular setup, shadows and AO work great and are quite responsive with only a split second regen time, and even Realistic View appears to work fine.

As always with a Mac, I'd suggest getting the absolute fastest CPU available on any given model if you plan on using Revit in a VM extensively.

[sultarc]

I can't see where a split second makes a real difference. I for one do not work on architecture like a machine. I have to have time to think problems through, etc. That makes a split second irrelevant. I've noticed no lag in my set up on the imac.

It's like the old argument about video tapes. VHS or BETA. The layman cannot tell the difference.

[Henry D]

I just upgraded my to Snow Leopard with Parallels & Windows 7 x64. When I open Revit in Parallels it asks me to register my copy of Revit even though it's already registered. Is this normal?