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We have a 2.66GHz Mac mini Snow leopard Server with the HDs in a RAID1 configuration and we have a need to use Multi user QuickBooks 2009 Premiere Contractors edition.

Can we install Parallels 5 on our server with the guest OS being Win-XP SP3 and then install QuickBooks 2009 Premiere Contractors edition?

My research says yes but Intuit has been less than forthcoming so I would like anyone who has tried a similar setup to let me know if this is a good idea or am I chasing my tail?

Thanks in advance for any help.

  • Essentially what virtualization does is using software to present itself as hardware (motherboard, memory, disks, network interfaces, etc) to a guest/client OS. I give software vendors who say "we don't support running in a VM a very hard time. It's as if they're saying "we support running on AMD but not Intel processors, or Seagate but not Western Digital hard drives". With very few exceptions, it should not be a problem. It's usually laziness and attempting to get out of their support obligations. – gWaldo Aug 31 '10 at 12:24

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Yes we were able to get Snow Leopard Server with Parallels 5 and Win-XP Pro to host the "Quick Books Server" that comes on the QuickBooks installer CD to work quite well. Then my customer decided they did not want Windows on their Mac Server so we deleted Parallels and all Windows components.

So we tried a second approach and that was to run Parallels 5 on 3GHz iMac and host QuickBooks from there using Multi User QuickBooks setup.

We kept getting errors from Quickbooks on the 2nd machine [older 2GHz MacBook (Intel Core Duo & not Intel Core 2 Duo) running Parallels 5 and Win-XP Pro]

Our data was stored on the newer iMac in the Users/UserName/Documents/QBstuff folder. The iMac used this data with no problem. It was just the 2nd Mac running Windows that could not access the data. We even shared the mac folder and had it sitting on the old macBooks Desktop but QuickBooks just said NO!

So then I moved the QuickBooks data to a folder created by Windows inside the "C:" drive. For the most part that made it work.

It turns out our old MacBook could use data from our Snow Leopard Server but it was walking through mud when it accessed data from the iMac.

We threw in the towel for now and will just use 1 copy of QuickBooks.

We even ran a pair of new CAT 5E cables from our AirPort Extreme router to the two Macs trying to run Parallels and Quickbooks and that did not seem to make any difference.

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I was running Windows XP SP3 inside Parallels 3, VMWare Fusion without any issues on both Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard on Macbook Pro (no RAID).

One of the programs installed inside Windows XP was Quickbooks - not sure which version (from year 2005 or 2006). There were no issues whatsoever.

This experience cannot guarantee success with QB 2009, but I'd say chances are pretty high.

Miro A.
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