MacOS – Virtual Machine support for DirectX 11 (Windows 10) hosted on OS X

It might be that the majority of the OSes that people virtualise (or at least those doing so with Parallels) can only use 4 GB of RAM anyway because they are 32-bit OSes, so it would not be necessary to have more than that. You shouldn't need more than 4 GB of RAM in the virtual machine anyway, so you partly answered your question. The majority of laptops these days don't have a massive 16 GB of RAM like you do; Parallels is only looking at the market side of things there.

If you really need more, why don't you just Boot Camp (you can Boot Camp with Linux as well); that way, you will use all of your computer's power if you need it. With your SSD, it won't take too long to restart.

There is a major difference in using IIS Express and the 'regular' IIS. The latter as installed by default in Windows.

In short, IIS Express runs sandboxed on its host environment. This means by default it cannot be accessed outside. Luckily, you're not the only one asking this as it has been adressed on StackOverflow several times. In my opinion, with this post having one of the better answers.

For future reference, this means:

1. Edit the applicationhost.config file (which holds info and bindings to all your IIS Express projects ever ran locally)
2. Execute the netsh http add urlacl url=http://*:8080/ command (possibly some other)
3. Open up the Windows Firewall to allow IIS Express and the desired ports to be accessed 'externally' (yes, your Mac = external, as far as Windows is concerned)

As a final tip I'd like to suggest to also add your Windows' system name to the Mac host file. This can easily be done running the following command in the OSX Terminal:

sudo nano /etc/hosts

By adding the Windows system name you can now use it to navigate to http://your-win-name instead of having to point to an IP Address.

Good luck!