When creating a new policy or editing an existing one, you may use the opportunity to establish remote administrative control over the settings for individual virtual machines in your corporate setup. This may help you prevent information leaks or minimize potential security vulnerabilities. This chapter lists the virtual machine settings that are available for remote control.

The following settings are currently available:

On this page, you can assign policies for pre-existing user groups that you can set up in Parallels My Account. Each user group is a sublicense of your main Parallels Desktop Enterprise Edition license with a unique key. Read this chapter to learn more.

To create user groups and populate them with users, please refer to this page. If you plan on using Single Sign-On for license activation, refer additionally to this page.

Creating a New Policy

To create a new policy, click on the Add button in the top left corner of the page. This will launch the multi-page policy creation process where you will have to provide the following information:

General Information

1. Name. Use a unique descriptive name in case the number of policies increases in the future.

2. Description.

3. Policy applies to. This setting allows you to add and remove the groups (as defined by ) that the policy applies to. Note: At any given time, each group may only have ONE policy applied to it, so you won't be able to add groups that already have other policies that apply to them. If you don't divide your Parallels users into groups, or have users assigned to the primary license key, you may assign a policy to the primary license key. To add a group, use the drop-down menu as indicated in the image above. To remove one already added, click on the

Throughout the policy creation process, you may use the Next and Previous buttons to move between the various steps and check settings.

Golden Image

Each policy includes a dedicated Golden Image that you may want to tailor to that group's specific needs.

Use the drop-down menu to select the preferred Golden Image and click Next.

Security Controls

At this step, you need to select specific limitations that will apply to this group of users. Presently, policies only define what users from your organization can do with their Parallels Desktop setups and not their virtual machines. The available controls are:

• Limit users to provisioned VMs only. This policy prevents users from setting up new virtual machines from sources other than your organization’s , as well as importing or cloning pre-existing ones. You may want to enact this policy to prevent members of your organization from setting up virtual machines for their own extracurricular activities.

• Limit the number of provisioned VMs per user to one. This setting prevents users from installing any more virtual machines from the approved sources (i.e., your organization’s ). Note: If you select this option alone, without the previous option, users will still be able to add new virtual machines using third-party sources, such as the default images available through Parallels Desktop.

Select the required settings and click Next.

VM Settings

This step allows you to control virtual machine settings remotely as part of the policy. Enable it by toggling the switch for the provisioned virtual machine image that (it will be marked as Current GI), and introduce the required settings.

If your policy users to create/add virtual machines from sources other than the provisioned Golden Image, you may also want to toggle the switch for VMs from other sources and introduce different or similar settings for those.

For the detailed description of available settings, refer to this .

Once you have filled out all the settings, click Add to enable the policy. You won't be able to create it unless all mandatory fields are filled.

When New Policy Applies

The newly created/amended policy will apply to the target installations when the local Parallels Desktop for Mac installation checks for them. It is designed to happen on the following triggers:

• The launch of the app.

• Activation or reactivation.

• Creating a new virtual machine.

• A change of state of a virtual machine, including:

Changing or Deleting an Existing Policy

The default view of the main Policies screen shows you the list of all the policies under your management, citing their names as provided during the setup process, their descriptions, and the list of groups they apply to. Right-clicking on a policy from the list allows you to edit or delete it.

If a policy is marked as "not applied", it either means that no groups were selected during the creation, or the group(s) it initially applied to was (were) deleted.