What You Need

To install and set up Parallels Workstation 6, you need:

A computer with:

• Minimum 1.66 GHz x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) CPU.

  To run 64-bit guest operating systems, you need a processor that supports the Intel VT-x hardware virtualization technology.

  To assign PCI Express (PCIe) devices directly to your virtual machines (Parallels Workstation Extreme only), you 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 them. To enable these features, in most cases enter BIOS, go to System Settings > Virtualization Support , and select the Enable Intel Virtualization and Enable Intel VT for Direct I/O check boxes.

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

  Important: VT-d features are supported by Parallels Workstation Extreme only.

• 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 8 GB of RAM if Parallels Workstation is installed in the 32-bit host OS and up to 64 GB if in the 64-bit.

• 350 MB of hard disk space for the Parallels Workstation 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.

• DVD-ROM drive.
• Ethernet network adapter.

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

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

  Parallels Workstation officially supports the NVIDIA Quadro® FX 1800, 3800, 4800, 5800, Q4000, Q5000, (Q2000? and Q6000?) 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 6 officially supports the following host operating systems:

Parallels Workstation 6 Extreme officially supports the following host operating systems:

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
• the 32-bit version of the alsa-plugins-pulseaudio package in the Fedora 10 (64-bit) operating system

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 installer tries to install it automatically.