PATRAN 2010 on Parallels

For those of you (like ourselves) that always wonder what runs and what does not run on Parallels (or any virtual machine for that matter) we have some exciting news. We have been able to run Patran 2010 and Patran 2010 for MD Nastran on our MacBook Pro's using Parallels 5. We have XP SP3 installed on Parallels. MD Nastran R3 also runs and you should believe me as I for that matter will not go into details over that.

Although fairly straight forward to get to work we did run into a very simple problem of which I will elaborate on the fix shortly. The other members of this blog might be so inclined to explain in a more technical manner why the fix,  but I do not intend to as I have no idea and I just know it works now!

First of all for those who want to see here is a screen shot of Patran 2010 MD running on my computer. (My computer is a MacBook Pro 3.06 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB Ram ).

We have not yet tested the limits of performance as compared to running it natively on the bootcamp partition. As we become more familiar with its performance we might be inclined to post updates.

Glitch: One of the problems we had was that when you launched Patran in Parallels 5 it would load to the main window and when you started a new file or open an existing file it would crash with no warnings. We suspected a memory problem. After talking with MSC Nastran and Parallels we came to two different ways of fixing this.

Approach 1:

On your Windows (in our case Windows XP) side go to Display properties/ Advance/ Troubleshoot and adjust the Hardware Acceleration bar to about half way. See picture below.

Then Apply the changes and Load Patran. After Patran has loaded I recommend coming back and changing the Hardware Acceleration back to Full. Why? Well because it works fine once it has launched and the mouse will seamlessly move form your Parallels to your Mac. If not your mouse will get stuck inside XP and you will have to Expose every time you need to move your mouse to the Mac side.  So, without a doubt this will fix your problem but it is a little tedious to deal with every time you launch Patran. That is why we have Approach 2.

Approach 2:

This requires changing the setting on the Virtual Machine. In this case open Paralles without launching Windows. In Parallels Go to:  Virtual Machine / Configure/  Hardware Tab/ Video. Here you want to disable the 3D Acceleration. This should be enough to let you launch Patran. We have tried it with 256 MB and it worked so there should not be a need to reduce it, but if it does not work feel free to play with this starting maybe at 64MB and moving your way up.

Hope this helps someone.