System Requirements

Before installing Parallels Workstation Extreme, please make sure that your computer complies with the hardware and software requirements listed here.

Hardware Requirements

• Minimum 1.66 GHz x64 (64-bit) CPU with the Intel VT-x hardware virtualization technology support.

  Note: To be able to assign PCI Express (PCIe) devices directly to your virtual machines, you will need a processor that supports the Intel VT-d technology.

  The support for Intel VT-x and VT-d may be disabled by default in some computers that actually support Intel VT-x and VT-d. To enable these features, you should usually enter BIOS, go to System Settings > Virtualization Support, and select the Enable Intel Virtualization and Enable Intel VT for Direct I/O checkboxes.

  For detailed infomation on enabling the Intel VT-x and VT-d features in BIOS, please refer to the OEM supplier's documentation.

• 2 GB RAM minimum. 4 GB RAM or more is recommended.

  The recommended amount of memory assigned to a virtual machine is 1-2 GB (you can assign up to 64 GB of RAM).

• 200 MB of hard disk space for the Parallels Workstation Extreme installation.
• About 30 GB of hard disk space for each virtual machine.

  To store a virtual machine's temporary files, you need to have twice as much free disk space as the overall amount of this virtual machine's memory (memory + video memory) +150 MB.

• CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive (optional).
• Ethernet network adapter.

If you want to use a directly connected PCIe video card in your virtual machine, you will also need:

• Two PCIe video cards. One video card for your host computer and the other – for the virtual machine.

  Parallels Workstation Extreme officially supports the NVIDIA Quadro® FX 3800, 4800, and 5800 video cards for virtual machines. For these video cards, use the latest drivers (starting from 182.65 for Windows and 180.51 for Linux) available on the manufacturer's website.

  Direct assignment of PCIe video cards requires an NVIDIA Video BIOS version of 62.00.62.00.01 or later. If you have a supported video card which does not have this BIOS level, please contact your OEM supplier.

Software Requirements

Parallels Workstation Extreme officially supports host computers with the following operating systems installed.

64-bit operating systems

• Windows 7
• Windows Vista SP2
• Windows XP SP2
• RHEL 5.3

In Linux operating systems, make sure the following software packages are installed:

• kernel development packages

  Note: In RedHat-based systems, such packages are called kernel-<kernel_version>-devel , in Debian-based systems - linux-headers-<kernel_version> .

• gcc of the version with which the host kernel was compiled
• 32-bit version of glibc 2.3.6 or later
• make or gmake

For 64-bit systems, it is also desired to have 32-bit alsa-lib installed in RedHat-based systems or lib32asound in Debian-based systems.

If you do not have any of the aforementioned packages installed on your Linux-based physical computer, the Parallels Workstation Extreme installer will try to install it automatically.