Upgrading from Business Edition

We expect many Enterprise Edition users to upgrade from our previous flagship version, the Business Edition.

The Enterprise Edition differs in the deployment and management procedures, with a particular emphasis on the new Management Portal, which enables you to apply and quickly change policies to groups of Parallels Desktop users and control and monitor Parallels Desktop virtual machines in your environment.

You can convert your existing Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition to an Enterprise Edition one by contacting your Parallels sales representative for purchase and further instructions. Make sure to communicate to them whether your setup uses per-device or per-user licensing, as the upgrade procedure differs slightly between these two setup types.

Note: A single Parallels Business account cannot hold more than one Enterprise Edition license. If you have multiple Business Edition licenses on the same account and would like to convert one of them to Enterprise Edition, you need to let your sales representative know which one you would like to convert.

It is important to know that converting your Business Edition license to an Enterprise Edition one will not require you to reactivate your existing installations, move users to new groups, or redeploy your existing setup.

Note: Parallels Desktop for Mac Enterprise Edition contains features that require end-user installations to communicate with the Management Portal for instructions. The earliest version of Parallels Desktop for Mac that supports that functionality is 20.1.0. When upgrading, ensure that all user installations are upgraded to that version or newer.

Once you convert your license to Parallels Desktop for Mac Enterprise Edition, your local Parallels Desktop for Mac installations will retain their assigned security policies until you set up different policies using the Management Portal, following this section of the guide.