Parallels Desktop for Mac Standard Edition; Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition; Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition; Parallels Desktop Lite. Select the Virtual Desktop Hosts tab page in the right pane. Select a VDI host in the VDI Hosts list and click Tasks > Properties. Jan 22, 2018 Can I import a VHDX file or.VDI, with Parallels Desktop for Mac to create a Windows instance?
To configure a VDI host:
- In the RAS Console, navigate to Farm / Site / VDI Hosts.
- Select the Virtual Desktop Hosts tab page in the right pane.
- Select a VDI host in the VDI Hosts list and click Tasks > Properties. The Host Properties dialog opens.
Enabling or disabling a VDI host in the farm
By default a VDI host is enabled in the farm. When it is disabled, published applications and virtual desktops cannot be served from it. To enable or disable a VDI host, use the Enable Host in site option on the Properties tab page.
Configuring VDI host connection settings
The following settings can be configured on the Properties tab page:
- VDI Type: Hypervisor type.
- VDI Version: Hypervisor version. If the hypervisor version that you are using is not listed, select Other.
- VDI Host: The VDI host IP address.
- VDI Port: Port number on which the VDI host listens for incoming connections.
- Description: An optional description.
- VDI Agent Service is running on Appliance: This option is enabled or disabled based on whether this feature is supported on the selected hypervisor. It specifies whether the RAS VDI Agent is running on a virtual appliance.
- VDI Agent: The virtual appliance IP address. This field is enabled if the option above is selected.
Specifying credentials
On the Credentials tab page, specify the user name and password to log into the VDI host. Click the Check Credentials button to verify the credentials that you've entered.
Configuring the RAS VDI Agent on the server
RAS VDI Agent can be configured on the Agent Settings tab page.
- Max number of powered-on guest VMs: Specifies the maximum allowable number of powered-on guest VMs.
- Publishing Session Timeout: Specifies the amount of time each session remains connected in the background after the user has closed the published application. This option is used to avoid unnecessary reconnections with guest VMs.
- Allow Client URL/Mail Redirection: Select this option to allow https and mailto links to be opened using a local application on the client computer rather than the server resources.
- Preferred Publishing Agent: Select a Publishing Agent with which the RAS VDI Agent should communicate. This can be helpful when site components are installed in multiple physical locations communicating through WAN. You can decrease network traffic by specifying a more appropriate Publishing Agent.
- Allow file transfer command: Allows you to enable or disable the remote file transfer functionality.
- Allow local to remote drag and drop. Enables the drag and drop functionality in a remote application. When this option is enabled, an end user can drag and drop files to a remote application on their local device. For example, a user can drag and drop a file to the Acrobat reader to open a PDF file. Or a user can drag and drop a file to Windows Explorer running on a remote server, etc.
Configuring RDP printing
The RDP Printer tab allows you to configure the renaming format of redirected printers. The format may vary depending on which version and language of the server you are using. Select the RDP Printer Name Format option specifically for the configured server:
- Printername (from Computername) in Session no.
- Session no. (computername from) Printername
- Printername (redirected Session no)
The other RDP Printing options available in the RDP Printer tab are:
- Remove session number from printer name
- Remove client name from printer name
Configuring VDI host maintenance time window
The Scheduler tab page allows you to create a maintenance time window for the server. During this time, published resources won’t be accessible from that server.
To configure a maintenance time window click Tasks > Add and then set the following options:
- Start date
- Time
- Duration
- Repeat
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The On disable option allows you to specify what should happen to current sessions when a scheduled task triggers.
In the Mac-based desktop virtualization world, there are two significant choices: Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. Both have been updated to take advantage of Mac OS X Lion. In addition to supporting Lion as a host, both take advantage of Apple's change in policy that lets users run the desktop version of Mac OS X Lion in virtual machines. Prior to Lion, Apple restricted such usage to Mac OS X Server. Both Parallels and Fusion of course run various versions of Windows and Linux, their primary use case.
As our review of Parallels Desktop 7 noted, there's not much compellingly new to that product since its last update, a year earlier. Does VMware Fusion 4.01 up the ante in any significant way? Not really. Just as Parallels Desktop 6 runs fine on Mac OS X Lion, so does VMware Fusion 3.1; the main reason to upgrade to Fusion 4.01 is to gain the ability to run Mac desktop VMs, a handy feature if you're a Mac developer or tester.
[ See InfoWorld's slideshow tour of Mac OS X Lion's top 20 features. | Learn why IT won't like Mac OS X Lion Server. | Keep up with key Mac OS X, iOS, and other Apple technologies with the Technology: Apple newsletter. ]
I disliked the difficulty of installing Mac OS X Lion in Parallels Desktop 7; the software assumes you don't have a local copy and thus defaults to re-downloading the whole 4GB image file. If you've already downloaded the Lion installer image, Parallels makes you jump through arcane hoops to use it. That's not the case with Fusion 4.01, which works with the Install Mac OS X Lion.app installer file just as easily as it does with a Windows or Linux .iso file -- that is, easily. Ironically, what Fusion won't do is connect you to the Mac App Store to download a fresh copy of the installer, as Parallels Desktop does. You need to get it yourself, which is not at all difficult. But it shows that Parallels assumed newbie users, whereas VMware assumed more technical Mac users.
Like Parallels Desktop, Fusion can't install Mac OS X from an existing partition, a Time Machine backup, or a disk image. And like Parallels Desktop, Fusion doesn't see FireWire or Thunderbolt drives, so once you're running the Mac installer or Lion itself in a VM, you can't use the migration tools that Apple provides for such transfers. Because most FireWire and Thunderbolt drives also have USB ports, you can switch buses for that migration, then go back to the speedier bus for everyday operations. Just note this means you can't back up your Mac VM separately via Time Machine if you don't have a USB drive for that purpose.
So, VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop are equivalent in their Mac VM support, save for their installation differences.
InfoWorld Scorecard | Performance (25.0%) | Value (10.0%) | Overall Score (100%) | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
VMware Fusion 4.01 | 8.0 | 8.0 | 8.0 | 7.0 | 8.0 | 7.9 |
Parallels Desktop 7.0 for Mac | 8.0 | 8.0 | 8.0 | 6.0 | 8.0 | 7.8 |
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