Today, I've helped a friend restore some contacts onto his iPhone. As the experience I gathered may be useful to you as well, I let you know.
First, on my Mac, while I had the contacts in the Windows version of Microsoft Outlook 2010 under Parallels Desktop, I had iTunes solely under my Mac OS X and didn't want to install it under Parallels to keep the Parallels image size down. (Which is of paramount importance when you use Time Machine to back up the contents of your computer, including the disk images of your Parallels virtual machines and want to save as much storage as possible.) After all, there are only two cases when it's indeed worth having iTunes in your virtual machine if you, otherwise, use the OS X version to synchronize your iOS devices:
First, on my Mac, while I had the contacts in the Windows version of Microsoft Outlook 2010 under Parallels Desktop, I had iTunes solely under my Mac OS X and didn't want to install it under Parallels to keep the Parallels image size down. (Which is of paramount importance when you use Time Machine to back up the contents of your computer, including the disk images of your Parallels virtual machines and want to save as much storage as possible.) After all, there are only two cases when it's indeed worth having iTunes in your virtual machine if you, otherwise, use the OS X version to synchronize your iOS devices: