Video of Pro/E and Intralink running on Parallels. 15MB, 06:54. Quicktime 7 required. WARNING: may be mind-numbingly boring, especially if you’re not a Mac user who uses Pro/E!

As mentioned previously, installing Windows XP Pro on Boot Camp was pretty straightforward. Installing Pro/E and Intralink (the file library/management system that integrates with Pro/E) went largely without a hitch as well. I was a bit worried about potential problems in getting Pro/E and Intralink to be able to pull the required floating licenses from the corporate server over our company’s VPN, but to my relief, that too went pretty smoothly.

Performance was very good, as could be expected since my MacBook Pro is, for all intents and purposes, a high-end Windows-compatible laptop. Of course, having to boot out of Mac OS X and then boot into Windows to run Pro/E is certainly not optimal. I still sought the ideal solution of being able to run Pro/E from within Mac OS X. It was time to try installing Pro/E on Parallels.

The official released version of Parallels (build 1970 as of this post) does not have direct 3-D graphics support and neither do any of the subsequent beta releases. However, the recent beta releases have reportedly sped up graphics performance by up to 50% so I decided to take my chances and install one of the beta releases.

I installed the latest Mac Build 3106 Beta 3 of Parallels. The installation was very easy - just follow the on-screen instructions, enter the Windows activation key and insert the Windows CD when prompted. The 3106 build is able to use an existing Boot Camp partition to run Windows, which was really what I wanted to do since I already had a successful installation of Windows, Pro/E, and Intralink on Boot Camp.

Unfortunately, there were several reports on the Parallels forums of people having problems with Parallels using their Boot Camp partition. I therefore decided to simply have Parallels install another copy of Windows (basically the default, recommended installation for Parallels) and not mess with my Boot Camp partition. I hadn’t activated Windows on Boot Camp yet so I didn’t expect to have any Windows activation issues.

There are plenty of blog posts, articles, and videos showing Parallels in action so I won’t go into any of the general details of using Parallels. However, I’ve got to say that this is some really, really cool software.

The next step was to install Pro/E and Intralink. As with my Boot Camp installation, the entire installation process went smoothly and I soon had Pro/E and Intralink running within Parallels. So what’s the word on performance? Well, although it actually ran much better than I expected, there is a definite performance hit when compared with Boot Camp. Spinning/panning/zooming assemblies is noticeably slower with the assemblies often moving in lurches. Manipulation of individual parts seems to be a bit better, but still not as “silky smooth” as in Boot Camp.

I’ve created a short video showing the application launch process, some manipulation of an assembly and part, and a regeneration of a part (approximately 130 features). A few details of my setup:

- Stock MacBook Pro (2.33 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB 667Mhz DDR SDRAM, ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM)
- 1028MB RAM alloted to Parallels
- Intralink 3.3
- Pro/E Wildfire 2

To give you an idea of the size of the assembly, the assembly in the video is one of a remote control with less than 20 parts. It may also be worth noting that the Pro/E and Intralink application launches are from a fresh restart of Windows. Applications in Windows generally launch faster on subsequent launches.

The bottom line on running Pro/E on Parallels? I haven’t spent a lot of time on it yet, but I’d say it is reasonably usable if you’re working on individual parts or drawings. If you’re going to be doing a lot of assembly work, you’re probably better off using Boot Camp for now. Then again, since I lean more towards being a Pro/E “power user”, I may be a bit more finicky when it comes to these types of performance differences.

Although not quite ready for prime time for me personally, I am very impressed with what the Parallels team has accomplished - big kudos indeed! And at the rate they’ve been improving the software, I’m very optimistic that these performance issues will be addressed sooner rather than later. 3-D hardware support will supposedly be forthcoming in the next major release of the software so I’ll definitely be following Parallels’ progress eagerly over the next few months.

Posted by Roger at 3:16 pm.