Migrating from Business Edition to Enterprise Edition

The steps that you, as the system administrator, need to take to migrate your Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition setup to Enterprise Edition depend on the type of activation in your existing Business Edition setup:

• Per-device, when you activate a copy of Parallels Desktop on each individual Mac using a license or sublicense key that you have created in Parallels My Account or

• Per-user, when each user activates their copy of Parallels Desktop by signing in with their corporate credentials using the standard SSO procedure via your organization's identity provider.

Note: Starting from late December 2024, organizations using Enterprise Edition will be able to mix and match the two types of activations in their Parallels Desktop for Mac setups, with some seats activated with per-device keys and some on a per-user basis via SSO.

Organizations with existing per-device Business Edition licenses

If your existing Parallels Desktop setup is activated on a per-device basis using license keys, you will have to take the following steps:

1. Contact your sales representative using Parallels My Account and purchase an upgrade;

2. Ask them to convert your existing Business Edition license to an Enterprise Edition one (the recommended path). If your organization has multiple Business Edition licenses, tell your sales representative which one to convert.

3. Make sure the product type on the license card in My Account has changed from Business to Enterprise;

4. [OPTIONAL] Configure Golden Images using the Parallels Management Portal;

5. [OPTIONAL] Set up or verify the existing sublicenses and configure or reassign policies accordingly;

6. [OPTIONAL] If your organization uses an identity provider (e.g., Microsoft Azure/Entra ID, Okta, or Ping), consider setting up a Single Sign-On (SSO) activation method and switching at least some of your users to it, as Enterprise Edition allows you to maintain a mix of license key and SSO activations across the same setup.

7. Make sure that all Parallels Desktop for Mac users in your organization have upgraded to at least version 20.1.0 or newer to enable communication with the Management Portal;

8. Verify that all your end-user installations remain activated;

9. Check the monitoring tab in the Management Portal and see it populated with virtual machines on your network.

As a result of this:

• The Business Edition product card of your choice on your My Account page will change to an Enterprise Edition product card, while the Enterprise Edition trial license will be suspended;

• You will not have to reactivate your end-users' copies of Parallels Desktop for Mac unless you have decided to split them into groups using sublicense keys (step 5 above);

• Your Golden Images from the trial license will be saved and offered to the users on your new Enterprise Edition license.

[NOT RECOMMENDED] Converting a trial Enterprise Edition license to a permanent one with an existing Business Edition per-device setup

This is not a recommended scenario. However, if you choose it, you will need to follow these steps:

1. Contact your sales representative using Parallels My Account and purchase an extension;
2. Explicitly tell them that you wish to convert your trial Enterprise Edition license to a permanent one. Your Business Edition users will remain activated with their Business Edition license;

3. [OPTIONAL] Create sublicenses for the groups of your Enterprise Edition users to benefit from granular policy management or if you wish to manage license allocations;
4. [OPTIONAL] Configure Golden Images using the Parallels Management Portal;
5. [OPTIONAL] Configure or reassign policies to groups according to your preferences;

6. Make sure that all Parallels Desktop for Mac users in your organization have upgraded to at least version 20.1.0 or newer to enable communication with the Management Portal;

7. Migrate/reactivate users to the new Enterprise Edition license;
8. Verify that all seats have been activated;

9. Check the monitoring tab in the Management Portal and see it populated with virtual machines on your network.

As a result of this:

• The Enterprise Edition trial license product card on your My Account page will be replaced with the permanent license card;

• You will not have to manually migrate all the users to the new setup and activate their licenses (Step 7 above);

• Your Golden Images from the trial license will be saved and offered to the users on your new Enterprise Edition license.

Organizations with existing per-user Business Edition licenses (SSO)

If your existing Parallels Desktop setup is activated on a per-user basis (SSO activation), you will have to take the following steps:

1. Contact your sales representative using Parallels My Account and purchase an upgrade;
2. Make sure that all Parallels Desktop for Mac users in your organization have upgraded to at least version 20.1.0 or newer to ensure communication with the Management Portal;

3. Make sure the product type on the license card in My Account has changed from Business to Enterprise;

4. [OPTIONAL] Configure Golden Images using the Parallels Management Portal;
5. [OPTIONAL] Your SSO setup used with the Business Edition license did not involve multiple user groups. If you would like to benefit from the flexibility it provides, follow the instructions in this chapter; Warning: If your IdP is Microsoft Azure/Entra ID, pay particular attention to steps (3) and (4) in theMapping existing groups... section to avoid potential issues with re-activation, license quota allocation, and policy application.
6. Verify that all your end-user installations remain activated;

7. Check the monitoring tab in the Management Portal and see it populated with virtual machines on your network. The end-user copies of Parallels Desktop for Mac refer to the server to verify their licenses every seven days. If you would like your users to reactivate their copies sooner, you could use your device management solution to run this command remotely:

prlsrvctl deactivate-license

As a result of this:

• The Business Edition product card of your choice on your My Account page will change to an Enterprise Edition product card, while the Enterprise Edition trial license will be suspended;

• Your end-users' copies of Parallels Desktop for Mac will eventually get in touch with the server and update their licensing information (Step 7 above);

• Your Golden Images from the trial license will be saved and offered to the users on your new Enterprise Edition license.

What will happen with password protections

If your previous Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition setup had password protection against specific user actions enabled, you will have to configure the respective policies using the Parallels Management Portal. See this chapter for more information.

Note: Once you convert your setup from Business Edition to Enterprise Edition, Parallels Desktop will retain the locally configured restrictions in the security tab until the policies are created in the Management Portal.

Once a policy is created and assigned to the user group, the previously created restriction in the security tab in Parallels Desktop preferences will be ignored, and the restrictions from the policy will be applied.

What will happen with configuration profiles

Your new setup will continue to respect any policies (like a specific local update server or policy or default virtual machine image) delivered via configuration profiles. However, this functionality will be removed in the future. For all new setups, we strongly recommend making the best use of the Parallels Management Portal's functionality.

For virtual machine images, the Management Portal currently supports providing one for Intel Macs and one for Apple Silicon Macs. In the future, as we remove support for configuration profiles, we will introduce support for providing multiple virtual machine images for each architecture, and you will be able to target specific user groups with each one.

Blocking major Parallels Desktop version upgrades can currently be achieved via the Policies section of the Parallels Management Portal.