Virtualbox 4.3.0 and Parallels incompatibility

[Monroo .]

Hi everyone,

I've been using Parallels Desktop 9 and Virtualbox 4.3.0 on Mac OS X 10.8.5 for a while now. Vbox 4.2 branch was failing to boot Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server guests so I've stuck with 4.1 branch until 4.3. While using 4.1.x Parallels and Vbox had played along nicely but since I've upgraded to 4.3, Parallels throws this message and quits when I try to use Vbox and Parallels at the same time: "An incompatible virtualization application is running."

Do you have any suggestions?

Sincerely
Monroo

[socratis]

Do you have any suggestions?

I'm afraid that the only one is to NOT run Parallels and VB at the same time. 4.3 is more strict about what can and can't be done. Windows users are facing the same issue with Hyper-V enabled. I'm pretty sure that the technical details are in the manual somewhere...

[Monroo .]

This is upsetting...

Should we expect any fixes to this issue in future releases or is this the intended behaviour from now?

Sincerely
Monroo

[michaln]

I'm afraid that the only one is to NOT run Parallels and VB at the same time. 4.3 is more strict about what can and can't be done.

I don't think that's relevant in this case... the added strictness concerns guests, not so much hosts.

Windows users are facing the same issue with Hyper-V enabled. I'm pretty sure that the technical details are in the manual somewhere...

Yes, and it's nothing new. Since Hyper-V takes over hardware virtualization, no one else can use it. It's always been that way. But using VirtualBox alongside VMware Workstation or Parallels is not at all like a Hyper-V-enabled host (the old Type 1 vs. Type 2 hypervisor nonsense).

[michaln]

Do you have any suggestions?

No, because we have no idea what Parallels means by "An incompatible virtualization application." As far as we know, VirtualBox can run alongside VMware on Macs.

As we've said several times, Parallels engineers are free to examine the VirtualBox source code and either adapt Parallels or provide suggestions to us as to how VirtualBox could be tweaked to work better alongside Parallels. We can't take a look at the Parallels source code and see what they are doing.