All posts by Kurt Schmucker

Feature How To’s, Parallels Desktop for Mac, Parallels Desktop for Mac Business, Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition

Automatically Reclaim Disk Space – a new feature in Parallels Desktop 16

This post is part of a series about new features in Parallels Desktop 16. 

Parallels Desktop is like having a Windows PC inside your Mac. In some ways, it’s better – after all, can you drag & drop a file from your Mac to a PC? Nope! In other ways, it’s just different, and the virtual hard drive component of a Parallels Desktop virtual machine (VM) is one of those differences. In this blog post, I will outline some of the differentiators between a hard drive and a virtual hard drive, and explain how the new feature, “Automatically Reclaim Disk Space”, assists in reducing wasted space on your Mac hard drive or SSD.

On a Mac, the “Macintosh HD” is the main storage. On a Parallels Desktop VM, the main storage is a file on your Mac where Windows, Windows apps, and your Windows documents (in some cases) are stored. Table 1 lists some of the characteristics of these two kinds of storage. 

  Mac  Windows VM 
Name  “Macintosh HD” (default)  Local Disk (C:) (in Windows)  (VM name)-0.hdd (on Mac) 
File type  Volume  .hdd file in the macOS 
Stores  – macOS  
– Mac applications  
– your documents  		 – Windows  
– Windows applications  
– your Windows documents (in some cases)  
Size Characteristics  Fixed  – Maximum size set at creation  
– Maximum size can be increased or decreased  
– Actual size increases or decreases, as needed  
   

The actual amount of space that the virtual hard drive occupies on your Mac main storage grows as you install Windows apps and Windows documents, and in many cases, shrinks as you delete apps or documents. The notable exception to this is a Windows Update. 

Windows Updates often require extra space for the download and for temporary files needed during the update, so the actual space needed by the virtual hard drive will often grow during the update process. While Windows removes the download and the temporary files at the conclusion of the update, the virtual hard drive doesn’t usually shrink after these are removed. This can lead to a situation in which there is unused space inside the virtual hard drive. Over time, with subsequent Windows Updates, this unused space can grow to many gigabytes. Figure 1 shows the result of one Windows 10 VM in Parallels Desktop 15.

Figure 1_Parallels Desktop 15 Reclaim Button

Now, the Parallels Desktop 15 user in the situation shown in Figure 1, could recover 23.52GB of empty space in the VM if they remember to open the configuration dialog and click on the “Reclaim” button. However, many people forget to do this. I like to think that I am an experienced Parallels Desktop user, but I often forgot to do this.

So, in Parallels Desktop 16, we added an option to do this automatically, as shown in Figure 2. After shutting down this VM, there will be approximately 24GB more space on the Mac main storage.

Figure 2_Parallels Desktop 16. Reclaim at Shutdown option

All that said, there is no free lunch. Reclaiming space takes some time, with the two most important variables being the overall size of the VM and the amount of space to be reclaimed. For the VM in Figures 1 and 2, this reclamation took about 17 minutes on my MacBook Pro. So, if you are the type of person who wants to shut down the VM, close the lid on your laptop, and run to your next meeting, you may not want to use this new option on a busy day filled with many meetings. On the other hand, if you are using a stationary iMac or a Mac Pro, then this option will help you avoid filling up your drive so quickly.

I hope this gives you a useful overview of this new feature in Parallels Desktop 16. Let us know in the comments how this feature is working for you. 

Feel free to test Parallels Desktop 16 for Mac for 14 days for free. 

The post Automatically Reclaim Disk Space – a new feature in Parallels Desktop 16 appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Feature How To’s, Parallels Desktop for Mac Business, Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition

New in Parallels Desktop 16 – “Prepare for Transfer”

This post is part of a series about new features in Parallels Desktop 16. 

Deploying a virtual machine (VM) can be cumbersome for two reasons:  

  1. It can be pretty large—sometimes 100s of gigabytes.  
  1. It is in a Macintosh-only file format.  

The new feature, “Prepare for Transfer”, addresses both of these concerns, and it is a feature in the Parallels Desktop Pro Edition and Parallels Desktop Business Edition. 

First, let’s talk about size. Even if there is room, most VMs can’t be copied to USB thumb drives because the size of the VM is too large for the way in which most thumb drives are formatted. In the case of the thumb drive in Figure 1, it was formatted in FAT32 (MS-DOS) so that it could be used with both a Mac and a PC.

Transfer VM
Figure 1_Even if there is room, most VMs can’t be copied to a USB Thumb Drive

The maximum file size for FAT32 is 4GB, and the VM I attempted to move is more than 9GB in size. 

I did I quick survey of the VM sizes on my Macs. The smallest is 9.39GB; the largest is 262GB; and the average seems to be around 30-40GB. Moving a 90GB VM from one hard drive to another takes about 130 minutes; moving to an SSD takes about 50 minutes; and I don’t even want to think about moving a 90GB VM to Dropbox or OneDrive, but I suspect it would take more than 20 hours. 

And, there is the issue of file format. Parallels Desktop VMs are stored as Mac packages. A package is basically a folder masquerading as a single file. You can force the Finder to show you the inside of a package, and Figure 2 shows the inside of one of my VMs.

Transfer VM
Figure 2_Inside the VM package

Packages are only supported on the Mac or an iOS device, so cloud storage systems aren’t really equipped to deal with packages, but they do the best they can. 

A Parallels Desktop power user, and especially an IT Admin who manages the Parallels Desktop deployments inside a company, often need to move VMs around and generally use non-Apple file servers and other devices. For this reason, IT Admins told us that help in moving/deploying VMs is high on the list of requested improvements for Parallels Desktop. This was the motivation behind the new “Prepare for Transfer” feature in Parallels Desktop 16, which compresses the VM and converts it to a single zip file that any system can handle. 

A Pro or Business Edition user just has to right-click on a VM in the Control Center to access this new feature, as seen in Figure 3. Choosing this menu command presents the dialog also shown in Figure 3.

Transfer VM
Figure 3_Preparing a VM for transfer

When the compression and conversion is finished, the VM appears in the Control Center as a “package”, as shown in Figure 4.

Transfer VM
Figure 4_The compressed VM in the Control Center

A single menu command will decompress this package into an ordinary VM, as shown in Figure 5. 

Transfer VM
Figure 5_Decompressing a VM is a single menu command

So, how long does it take to compress and decompress a VM, and what compression savings does it achieve? While the CPU speed on the Mac and the speed of the disk drive or SSD are factors, the only remaining important variable is the size of the VM. I took some quick measurements on my MacBook Pro to give you some idea of the time involved, and they are shown in Table 1. 

OS  VM size (GBs)  Compressed size (GB)  Compression Time  Decompression Time 
Windows 10  10 GB  5 GB  1 minutes, 
5 seconds 		 21 seconds 
Ubuntu  11 GB  5 GB  1 minute, 
26 seconds 		 24 seconds 
macOS Big Sur  31 GB  23 GB  4 minutes,  
15 seconds 		 1 minute, 
19 seconds 
Windows 10 Insider Preview  262 GB  200 GB  38 minutes, 
31 Seconds 		 11 minutes, 
52 seconds 

I hope this gives you a useful overview of this new feature in Parallels Desktop 16. Let us know in the comments how this feature is working for you. 

Feel free to test Parallels Desktop 16 for Mac for 14 days for free. 

The post New in Parallels Desktop 16 – “Prepare for Transfer” appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Feature How To’s, Parallels Desktop for Mac, Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition, Support How To’s

New in Parallels Desktop 16 – Synchronized “Do Not Disturb”

This post is part of a series about new features in Parallels Desktop 16. 

“I turned on ‘Do Not Disturb’, but I am still getting annoying alerts. Make them stop!” 

For most people, the idea of running two operating systems at the same time is pretty strange. So, it is not surprising that when they change a setting in one operating system, they don’t even think about the other operating system. And, that is certainly the case with the “Do Not Disturb” setting. 

Both the macOS and Windows OS have a “Do Not Disturb” setting. That said, in Windows it is called “Focus Assist”. (Figure 1)

Figure 1_Do Not Disturb in Mac and Focus Assist in Windows

Mac users will certainly go to the Mac setting first, so in Parallels Desktop 16, the Windows Focus Assist setting is synchronized with the Mac Do Not Disturb setting. Change the Do Not Disturb setting on the Mac, and Parallels Desktop changes the Focus Assist setting in Windows, as you can see in this video: 

The Do Not Disturb setting is even more readily available in macOS Big Sur because of the new Control Center item in the Mac menu bar, so this synchronization will be even more useful when you migrate to macOS Big Sur in the Fall. 

Have you updated to Parallels Desktop 16? When are you planning to update to macOS Big Sur? Let us know in the comments or on Facebook or Twitter.

Feel free to test Parallels Desktop 16 for Mac for 14 days for free. 

The post New in Parallels Desktop 16 – Synchronized “Do Not Disturb” appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Big Sur VM, Feature How To’s, macOS Big Sur, Parallels Desktop for Mac, Parallels Desktop for Mac Business, Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition, Support How To’s

Can you install the macOS Big Sur public beta in a VM?

Can you install the macOS Big Sur public beta in a VM?

Quick answer: Yes 

The details: Now that Parallels Desktop 16 has been released, I am able to talk about this new version of Parallels Desktop that I have been using for about the last six months. 

I was able to install the macOS Big Sur public beta in a VM. In fact, this is my preferred way to test out a new OS that is under development, and I have been doing so for years. OSes under development can have significant issues, and if you test them out in a VM there is no risk to your Mac. 

Can macOS Big Sur be installed in a Parallels Desktop 16 VM? 

Yes, it can, but an additional variable to consider is the host OS. 

On a Catalina host 

I encountered no issues at all, but it did take a while. A large portion of this time was downloading the “Install macOS Big Sur public beta” app—a 12.3GB download! 

Normally, installing the Parallels Tools in a new OS under development is a mistake. The Parallels Tools are individually designed for each guest OS. While it is possible, having the Tools for an older OS work in a newer OS is unusual. Installing older versions of Tools can sometimes cause an OS to “lock up”. So, what I usually do is not install the Tools by default, make a copy of the Tool-less VM, and then see what happens when I install the Tools. 

I did this for the Big Sur VM on my Catalina host, and the Parallels Tools did not cause any issues. Not everything worked perfectly, but it is quite usable. 

On a Big Sur host 

This went perfectly and everything I have tested works fine. However, I am not a professional tester, so I will wait to hear the experience of the engineers in the Parallels QA team. 

Can macOS Big Sur be installed in a Parallels Desktop 15 VM? 

On a Catalina host 

The answer is “yes” this can be done, but there are several gotchas to worry about. My first three attempts did not succeed, but on the fourth try I did get it to work. 

I will wait until macOS Big Sur is released to share images and videos of the installation and use of a macOS Big Sur VM in both Parallels Desktop 15 and Parallels Desktop 16. Perhaps some of the issues I encountered will be gone in the actual customer release of Big Sur. 

If you have also started using macOS Big Sur with Parallels Desktop, please let us know about your experiences in the comments or on Facebook or Twitter.  

Please also refer to this knowledge base article for further information.

Feel free to test Parallels Desktop 16 for Mac for 14 days for free. 

The post Can you install the macOS Big Sur public beta in a VM? appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Feature How To’s, News, Parallels Access, Parallels Access 6, Personal Help, Remote Help

How to Use the New Personal Help in Parallels Access 6

Parallels Access provides an elegant and easy-to-use way to connect your phone or tablet to a remote computer that you own or control. Since its first release in 2013, Parallels Access™ has regularly added significant new features like file management, a web portal and support for split-screen multitasking on iPad.  

However, there has been one remote feature missing: the ability to connect to a friend’s remote computer to assist them with a problem. This feature is often called “Personal Help”—and the latest release of Parallels Access, version 6.0, adds this oft-requested feature.  

In this blog post, I’ll show you this feature in action, as well as how to set it up, both from the point of view of the helper and the person requesting help.

Learn more about how to use Personal Help in this short video:

Note that there a several ways to do this. Here, I am showing one way: the helper using Parallels Access on an iPad, and the requestor asking for help with a Mac task.) 

  What the helper does and sees  What the requestor does and sees 
1   – Requests help with a computer task 
2  On the new “Other Computers” tab, select the “+” button. Generate a Parallels Access email to the requestor.  (See Figure 1)   –
Figure 1_The helper initiates the process (detailed in row 2 of the above table)
  What the helper does and sees  What the requestor does and sees 
3    Download and install Parallels Access from the link provided by the helper. (See Figure 2) 
Figure 2_Downloading and Installing Parallels Access
  What the helper does and sees  What the requestor does and sees 
4  The requestor’s Mac is available for a connection in Parallels Access in the “Other Computers” tab. Connect to this Mac. (See Figure 3)  Allow the connection from the helper.    (See Figure 4) 

Figure 3 and 4:

  What the helper does and sees  What the requestor does and sees 
5  You now have access to the remote computer. Help with the computer task.  (See Figure 5)   
6  Close the connection to the remote Mac.   
Figure 5_Connection is established

Notice that although the requestor is giving access to their computer, they remain in control: they explicitly grant permission for each remote connection and can terminate the session at any time. 

I hope this much-requested new feature in Parallels Access enables you to provide help when asked and receive help when you need it. Let us know in the comments how it’s working for you. 

Do you need to help a friend, family member or coworker with a technical issue? Download a free trial of Parallels Access and remotely connect to their computer.  

The post How to Use the New Personal Help in Parallels Access 6 appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop for Mac

How to Run Games and Other Apps from the Microsoft Store on a Mac

All Mac® users know about the Mac App Store®, and most have probably used it to get an app or two. If you’re also a Parallels Desktop® for Mac user, there’s another store you should check out: the Microsoft Store. The Microsoft Store is accessible from Windows 8 or 10—but in all practical terms, this […]

The post How to Run Games and Other Apps from the Microsoft Store on a Mac appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Parallels Desktop for Mac

How to Use the Mac Touch Bar with Windows Applications in Parallels Desktop 14

This is part of a series of blog posts about the new features in Parallels Desktop 14. Last year in Parallels Desktop® 13 for Mac, we added Touch Bar™ support for Windows applications. This proved to be so popular that we increased Touch Bar support in Parallels Desktop 14. Applications with built-in support Touch Bar […]

The post How to Use the Mac Touch Bar with Windows Applications in Parallels Desktop 14 appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop 14, Parallels Desktop for Mac

How to Free Up Disk Space on your Mac by Upgrading to Parallels Desktop 14

This is part of a series about the new features in Parallels Desktop® 14 for Mac. If you’re upgrading to Parallels Desktop 14 from an earlier version, you’ll save a lot of space. The exact amount depends on a variety of factors, but this blog post will explain all the new features of Parallels Desktop […]

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4K Camera, Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop 14, Parallels Desktop for Mac

How to Use a 4K Camera in Parallels Desktop 14

This is one of a series of blog posts about the new features in Parallels Desktop® 14 for Mac. One of the new features in Parallels Desktop 14 is support for 4K cameras. This new feature is extremely easy to set up and use—and this blog post will show you how. Shared Resource vs. Exclusive […]

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Try macOS Mojave with Parallels Desktop for Mac

by Guest Blog Author, Alex Sursiakov, Program Manager at Parallels On June 4 at the WWDC 2018 keynote, Apple® announced major updates to all of its software platforms. One of them is macOS® Mojave, the new version of the operating system for your Mac®. macOS Mojave will be available to Mac users this fall. But what […]

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