Once your organization’s Parallels Desktop setup grows beyond a couple of dozen machines, the need often arises to manage them more granularly while relying less on manual procedures for things like setup, updates, and maintenance.
Thankfully, one of the main features of Parallels Desktop Enterprise Edition is the Parallels Management Portal — your one-stop shop for setting up and controlling your entire fleet of Parallels Desktop installations and virtual machines.
This section of the guide deals with all the tasks that can be completed from the Management Portal, such as deployment, management, policy provisioning, and removal of virtual machines.
You can reach the Management Portal by clicking the respective button in your Parallels My Account business profile or directly following this link.
Note: When working with the Management Portal, make sure to select the Parallels business account with a Parallels Desktop Enterprise Edition license registered to it.
If you would like us to improve or add a specific feature to the Parallels Management Portal, you can use our feedback form by clicking on the user icon in the top-right corner and selecting the Provide Feedback option. Just type in your request and hit Send, and our Product Management team will receive your idea via email.
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.
Attention: Your primary license key cannot be used to create a user group. All user groups require secondary license keys, as described below.
For security reasons, we strongly advise against using your primary key directly. Any compromised secondary keys can be deleted and replaced with new ones.
To create user groups and populate them with users, please refer to .
To create a new policy, click on the Add button in the top left corner of the page.
Presently, policies only define what users from your organization can do with their Parallels Desktop setups and not their virtual machines. The four available settings are:
Note: As Parallels Desktop Enterprise Edition develops, we will be adding more policies to this menu.
Do not allow removing corporate virtual machines;
Do not allow upgrading to the next major Parallels Desktop version. This setting will still allow users to update their Parallels Desktop installations to a minor version (e.g., 20.0 to 20.1) but will prevent them from upgrading to a major version (e.g., from 20.x to 21.x) when it becomes available. Enabling this setting will allow you to first ensure that a major new version suits your needs before proceeding with a fleet-wide upgrade. Note: This setting will have no effect if your organization is running a local update server, or your update policies are managed via an MDM solution.
When adding a new policy, provide the following information:
Name. Use a unique descriptive name in case the number of policies increases in the future;
Description;
User group. This setting allows you to add and remove the groups that the policy applies to. To add a group, select one from the drop-down list and click Add. To remove one already added, click on the Trash Can symbol next to the one already listed;
Set the restrictions as described above;
Click Add.
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.
Warning: Deleting a policy is non-reversible. Please make sure you are deleting the right one.
Limit users to corporate virtual machines 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 corporate virtual machines per user to one. This setting prevents users from installing any more virtual machines from the approved sources (i.e., your organization’s ). ;
This section of the Management Portal is where you go to designate the virtual machines that will be deployed across your organization.
Note: To learn how to prepare a virtual machine for deployment, please refer to this section of the guide. The result should be a .pvmp
file containing a virtual machine and a .txt
file containing the SHA-256 checksum for it.
At the moment, it contains sections for two virtual machine files available to all Parallels Desktop users in an organization, one for all your Apple silicon Macs and one for Intel Macs.
When adding a virtual machine for deployment, the following three fields are mandatory:
Name. Give the virtual machine a descriptive, easy-to-read name, e.g., {company_name} Windows 11 Pro for Arm
;
Download URL. Upload your virtual machine .pvmp file to a cloud location that allows direct file links (i.e., a https
link that ends in /{vm_file_name}.pvmp
) and is accessible to all the machines where you plan on deploying it. Please read the requirements provided here carefully;
Checksum (SHA-256). When packaging a virtual machine (right-click on it in the Control Center and choose Prepare for Transfer), the resulting .pvmp
file is accompanied by a .txt
file containing a SHA-256 checksum for it. Copy and paste the contents of that file in this field.
Note: If you have the .pvmp
virtual machine file but not the .txt
file with its checksum, you can quickly find it by following these steps:
Right-click on the .pvmp
file while holding down the Option key and choose Copy {file_name} as Pathname;
Open Terminal;
Type in shasum -a 256 {file_desination}
, pasting the copied pathname from Step 1, and hit Enter.
The output will look similar to the following:
63a90c3c38cc8c358221da339068fc1292b10bf7c00ed8449787b0e6019d706b /Users/parallels/Parallels/Windows11Pro.pvmp
This section allows you to monitor all the Parallels virtual machines in use with your organization and delete them in case of need. The list shows not only the corporate machines installed from the Golden Images but also other virtual machines running on your users' Parallels Desktop installations.
You can use the drop-down menu in the top-left corner to select which of the following parameters you want to monitor:
Note: All fifteen parameters cannot fit on most screens. Use horizontal scrolling to see more information.
User name. This parameter is derived from the user account name on that Mac;
Computer name;
VM name. As designated during the virtual machine’s image preparation process;
VM state. This parameter has the following possible values: Running, Stopped, Suspended, Unknown;
VM status. This parameter will help you sort between active virtual machines, the ones whose Parallels Desktop setup had been deactivated, and the ones that have failed to delete;
VM OS, VM Edition, VM OS build. This sorts your organization’s virtual machines by the operating systems, including editions and build numbers;
VM Source. This parameter helps you indentify which virtual machines were set up using your company's Golden Images;
Last used date (UTC). This shows when the particular virtual machine was last launched. This parameter may help you quickly find unused virtual machines;
Last reported date (UTC). This parameter shows the date and time a specific virtual machine’s presence was reported to the server;
Parallels Desktop Version. This shows the major version number of the Parallels Desktop installation used to run a particular virtual machine. This may help you identify installations that have failed to upgrade to a newer, better version of Parallels Desktop;
Parallels Tools Version. Using this parameter, you can, for example, identify the machines in your organization that either do not have Parallels Tools installed or use an outdated version;
Mac serial number;
CPU. In this column, you can sort your virtual machines by their operating systems’ target architecture: Intel or Arm (Apple silicon);
Uncheck the parameters you won’t need for your monitoring requirements.
Use the drop-down menu in the bottom-right corner to adjust the number of virtual machines shown per page from 10 to 40.
Use the search bar in the top right corner to find virtual machines by their known parameters, or use the individual filters in each column to search by that column’s parameter. Clicking on the funnel symbol in the header of each column will help you filter virtual machines by a specific parameter.
This may, for example, help you quickly identify the machines that require your immediate attention when an urgent upgrade is required to plug a known severe vulnerability.
Once you have located a specific virtual machine, you can delete it by right-clicking on it and selecting Delete Virtual Machine. Read the dialog carefully and confirm by clicking Delete.
Note: Be aware that the Management Portal does not push commands to client endpoints; instead, Parallels Desktop apps on user devices periodically connect with the management infrastructure to check for new commands. Because of this, a virtual machine may be listed as Pending Deletion
If you delete the only virtual machine that was running on a particular Parallels Desktop installation, its user will be offered to download a new virtual machine from the Golden Image supplied by your organization.
Sometimes, information on a specific virtual machine may be incomplete or entirely missing from the Parallels Management Portal's virtual machine monitoring panel described earlier in this chapter. This section provides a list of possible explanations for each case so that you may follow it to eliminate potential causes.
The VM is no longer active or has been removed.
The Parallels Desktop for Mac application did not manage to report/communicate with the Parallels backend after the VM was created.
The Parallels Desktop for Mac application is on an older version that does not support reporting these specific details. Use the Parallels Desktop Version parameter to verify.
The Parallels Desktop for Mac application has been updated but hasn’t reported to the portal yet. Use the Last reported date (UTC) parameter to verify.
Parallels Tools is not installed.
Parallels Tools is installed but outdated and requires an update. Use the Parallels Tools Version parameter to verify.