If you’re an end user who wants the best-of-both-worlds experience of running Windows on a Mac, or if you’re an IT admin who wants to gain more control over the Macs running on your network, Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac is a great option.
We found the latest version of Parallels is very good and while largely focused on Windows 10, it suits other operating systems virtualization candidates as well. It’s faster, loads and terminates guest VMs more quickly. And it has become pricey, with an annual subscription model that might cause pushback. There are also bones thrown to developers, some of them very useful.
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We found a few small foibles and a few dot-zero recoverable crashes. We feel that after the first patch set, only serious pros and developers will be able to find the foibles. After the initial patch set is released, we can recommend Parallels 11 for Mac to all Mac users.
We’ve reviewed Parallels for Mac before, and have used prior editions extensively. It is now split into three editions, Standard, Pro, and Business, all based on the same code. There’s a free trial that is stunningly simple to deploy.
The Standard Edition is $69, and the Pro and Business Editions are $99 per year. The Pro and Business Editions are essentially the same, but the Business Edition has a licensing and rollout scheme that suits larger organizations. Some of the Business Edition bits weren’t available at press time, so we can’t comment on them.
Hidden in the background is Parallel’s administrative push, which revolves around administrative support for connecting to Microsoft’s Active Directory policy controls. This feature is not available quite yet, but connections to Microsoft Systems Center offers a viable way of corralling the proliferation of Macs in Windows networks. Macs are often second-class citizens and an uncontrolled turf residing inside administrative boundaries, despite accessibility controls imposed, and services enabled by SAMBA4.
All three versions do the same essential task: allow virtualized guest operating systems on a Mac, in what’s technically termed a Type 2 Hypervisor application. An enormous amount of attention has been paid towards use of Windows, especially Windows 10. In what’s termed “coherence mode”, Parallels integrates desktops and the differences in behavior between the Mac GUI and Windows 7/8/10 GUIs. If that’s what you’re doing — using Windows on a Mac — the Parallels 11 implementation is the closest we’ve found in terms of seamless integration. And for those who like experiments, you can run different MacOS versions concurrently in Parallels, as well.
NET RESULTS
| COMPANY | PARALLELS |
|---|---|
| PRODUCT | Parallels Desktop For Mac 11 |
| PRICE | Free trial to $99 with upgrade discounts, per annum subscription |
| PROS | Very good Windows 10 integration; deeper guest controls |
| CONS | Pricey, dearth of docs, a few dot-zero problems |
Features
There are plentiful features, many new, but the best ones are those associated with the aforementioned Windows 10 coherence mode. We were able to meld Windows 10 desktops on a Mac to the point of near transparency, and certainly more than we expected from these two completely different methods of UI plumbing.
It’s possible to have a desktop that looks like a Mac, yet has file associations that bring up Windows apps transparently, then use things like Mac-configured printer devices. Windows Action Center is one click away, and your context can be switched to Windows 10 from OSX.
Yes, you can run Microsoft’s Cortana on your Mac, although Siri isn’t available yet. We could ask Cortana to invoke Mac apps. Cortana doesn’t care; with some trickery, you can invoke apps with command line switches, something we found to be a potential boon. “Cortana open Firefox New York Times,” for example .
The bigger the Mac screen size, the more interesting the overall integration became as we added a Windows 10 Professional payload as a guest operating system. There are still things it can’t do, but we were impressed. You can even sync the volume controls between the Mac and Windows settings.
Parallels has also introduced an online store with various utilities designed to make integration between Mac and Windows easier.
Windows Ops
The transparency of the melded OS X and Windows 10 versions is very well done. It’s possible to choose default settings for various file actions. An example would be to open all .xls files with Windows Excel instead of an installed Mac Excel or LibreCalc. Default email handlers that are overarching all running OSs is possible, as well.
It’s also possible for a Windows 7+ host to share data from the Mac’s location (Location Based Services). This said, a Windows instance is still vulnerable to attacks, and so instances need to be updated within the Windows context, and protected with whichever choice of endpoint security software is preferred for the Windows client.
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Parallels also makes a plug-in (not reviewed here) that can allow a Mac instance to be managed by Microsoft System Center 2012 that is said to honor/invoke group policies, and other directives, making Macs “fuller” members of Microsoft’s AD command/control/authentication infrastructure. This advantage may sway larger organizations, despite the $99 per annual subscription fee, to look at the Parallels management plane — coupled to the fact that Parallels continues to support Windows 7x, and Apple’s Bootcamp does not.
Strangenesses
We tried to do conversions of other-format (vhd, vmfs, vbox) VMs and were usually rewarded. A Windows 8.1 VMware Fusion OS didn’t convert. Generally, the OS version/patch level didn’t seem to make that much difference in a successful conversion. At press time, we had an open sample support ticket with Parallels to troubleshoot the failure. New installations, like a SkywaveLinux Ubuntu “OEM” distro ISO generated a guest OS/VM swimmingly on the third attempt, but we could not find rhyme or reason for the first two failures. Parallels 11 was also unable to start a new VM from a bootable Windows 10 Pro factory USB drive — but a bootable ISO on a DVD worked.
There is a disk cleanup program, heaven-sent when we were testing large wads of binary files associated with the guest OS/VM displacements, which can run very large with unscraped Windows and Linux binaries. A new version of Parallels Tools is automatically installed into existing guest OS/VM invocations, and VMs we “updated” had to be restarted to make the Tools work correctly.
The cleanup can be needed for developers, as it’s possible to coredump the guest OS. These files can be as large as the core+cache of the guest VM, in our case, 1.2G to 40GB. Even terabyte Mac hard drives can fill quickly this way. That said, developers can get a chance to see what evil has befallen their OS — although few developers know how to parse core dumps.
There’s a Travel Mode that disables Windows functions that consume a lot of power. In prior editions, after about 10 minutes almost any Windows guest OS/VM we used would start to heat Mac notebooks, especially our MacBook Air. The fan would kick on, and the battery would go on a non-linear dive towards eventual empty until we stopped the VM.
This happens less now, and takes still longer to kick into in processor-fan cooling mode when we selected Travel Mode. We didn’t do any scientific experiments on the decrease, as differing apps have a differing result. Suffice to say that our subjective results are: saves more power by controlling Windows power use — perhaps more than Microsoft does.
Scorecard
| Installation/Documentation | 3.5 |
|---|---|
| Features | 4 |
| Administration & Control | 4.0 |
| Performance | 4 |
| Total | 3.75 |
For Developers
The Parallels for Mac 11 Pro edition is poised towards “power users”, developers, admins, analysts, and infrastructure personnel. There is supposed integration with Chef and Jenkins that requires only minimal setup, but we could find little support for either in the Parallels app or in the Parallels docs and website.
The Jenkins support amounts to a Jenkins plug-in/jar that allows Jenkins to find and use Parallels as a provisioner, and this is similar to how Chef can find Parallels and “cook recipes” for fleets of guest OS/VMs. We tried the plug-in, and it works in a way similar to how Jenkins uses Oracle VirtualBox in terms of provisioning jobs and runs. A trial recipe cooked up for Chef found Parallels, and used it correctly to launch a trial Docker container. Other plumbing still needs to follow well-known drills for instance access and control, and so while very useful, there’s only linkage, not heavy partnership-type support.
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Macs can handle native Docker containers, but Parallels adds integral sandboxing, if of the Type 2 variety, to Parallels. It’s easier to kill errant Docker appliances with Parallels, and using Parallels for Docker images was tidier. Although support is claimed, we could again find only the sparsest support on the Parallels website.
OS X developers can host multiple concurrent OS X images as guest OS/VMs. Although this can tax the host’s processing power, it’s quite do-able and we recommend lots of extra memory to prevent swapping. We were unable to pipe output isolated from machine to second monitor.
A Desktop Control Center (DCC) is used to launch guest OS/VMs. It has selections on it to run the VM in debug mode, but not much information is available. Selections on the DCC also allow a quick SSH selection — but only if SSH is installed on the guest and is listening, as it’s not installed as part of the Parallels Tools update to the VM.
Overall
The integration of the Windows 10 and OS X can be really tight and chime together well, or be made as separate as two notebooks sharing the same monitor. We were impressed by the integration and better liveliness of Parallels 11 for Mac overall. For Mac users needing Windows 10, it’s a great method of integration, if the annual subscription charge doesn’t present a stumbling block. For those who use both on a daily business, this one’s de riguer . Those who use Linux and other distros as well as MacOS X, control gets marginally better, but overall VM load and suspend times decrease favorably. The developer bits can be very handy, but more is needed — along with clear docs for all audiences. Simple Help screens don’t suffice.
Tom Henderson runs ExtremeLabs, in Bloomington, Ind. He can be reached at kitchen-sink@extremelabs.com.
How We Tested Parallels for the Mac
We tested Parallels on a MacBook Air (8GB memory, 500G SSD) and a MacBook Pro Retina (16GB, 1TB conventional drive) with Windows VMs from 7x through 10 (Pro and Enterprise Editions) on a wired/wireless network (Netgear 802.11n GBE router, Xfinity broadband to our network operations center at Expedient in Carmel, Ind.). We used both Mac and Windows apps to test Windows 10 integration. We also used Ubuntu 14.04 (fresh install and also as SkywaveLinux/Ubuntu 14.04) LTS installs, Ubuntu Linux 14.04 Server, numerous Docker 1.6-compatible CoreOS and Ubuntu appliances, with Jenkins 1.609.2 (JRE 7.2) and Chef Server (with Ohai 8.6.0) in the Kitchen generating 10 Ubuntu Core nodes until memory ran out.
