2 different Win versions between BootCamp/Parallels?

[mistamarko]

Sorry if a dumb question, I just got a Mac (been a PC user 20 years) and am trying to wrap my head around the concept of all this stuff working.

I have the new iMac 5K Late 2015. BootCamp does NOT support Windows 7 anymore, which is what I was running. I have it working on Parallels nicely, but need it for video editing, and the performance loss of a VM isn't ideal for this.

Is it possible to ALSO have a BootCamp partition that co-exists with the VM, but both be different versions of Windows? So, Parallels Desktop running Win 7, but also have a BootCamp partition running Windows 10.

 

[takeshi74]

Not sure what you mean by "BootCamp partition that co-exists with the VM, but both be different versions of Windows". If they're different versions of Windows then they're not coexisting.

Boot Camp and Parallels can certainly be different. You can set up Parallels to run Boot Camp but you can also just create a separate VM.

 

[Gjwilly]

Parallels can create purely virtual machines for Windows (and multiple Windows versions) or it can access actual Bootcamp partitions. If accessing an actual partition I would not expect any performance advantage over Bootcamp since it's still a virtual machine but I've never done it so I can't really say.
If you do use the same partition for both Bootcamp and Parallels you will need two separate Windows licenses or else you violate the Windows TOS.
So if you want a Bootcamp installation of Windows 10 and a virtual installation of Windows 7 that would work but if you want to be able to access that Bootcamp installation via Parallels Desktop without rebooting into Windows you will need two different licenses for Windows 10.

 

[BeefCake 15]

To simplify how they work, OS X has no idea what you're doing in the VM world but it knows what's installed on BootCamp. The two will never cross paths.

To answer your question, yes you can have one version of Windows or any OS on VM and the other on BootCamp.