What’s new in Parallels RAS 21.0 (and why it’s important)
Parallels RAS 21.0 introduces platform readiness, security hardening, and daily operational advantages, all with the goal of helping IT do more with less and providing an improved end-user experience.
The release focuses on three key outcomes:
- Simplifying management
- Enhancing access control
- Increasing end-user confidence
At a glance, highlights include Hyper-V support for Windows Server 2025, increased scalability for Secure Gateway, guardrails to reduce provisioning failures, improved user experience with dynamic reconnect behavior, RADIUS contextual controls, fine-grained clipboard redirection control, and new AVD cloud cost visibility.
Key themes of the version 21 update
Platform readiness
The Parallels RAS platform’s readiness has been significantly enhanced in version 21.0, featuring several key improvements. Official support for Windows Server 2025 as a Hyper-V provider, including both standalone and clustered environments, ensures smooth adoption for customers upgrading to the latest Microsoft server version.
The Secure Gateway has been optimized for scalability and performance, reducing the infrastructure footprint by requiring fewer instances, cutting costs, and improving responsiveness—particularly for organizations with heavy User Portal usage.
Additionally, continuous updates to core components now support updated versions of FSLogix, macOS Tahoe 26, and iOS/iPadOS 26 client operating systems, along with refreshed third-party packages in the HALB appliance, ensuring long-term reliability, security, and compatibility.
Administrator experience
Parallels RAS 21.0 introduces several administrator-focused improvements designed to simplify management, reduce errors, and improve operational efficiency.
Multi-domain management is now easier with granular control, flexible OU browsing, and domain joining across complex Active Directory environments, reducing overhead and minimizing errors during VDI provisioning.
In this new release, the solution now ensures that new templates and template versions are created only when the RAS agent is up to date, with notifications to administrators prompting updates to prevent future auto-upgrades and potential issues on cloned virtual machines.
When creating templates, Parallels RAS now includes domain credential validation, which blocks creation or notifies administrators immediately if credentials are incorrect, thereby helping prevent failed clone attempts.
Finally, administrators can reassign orphaned hosts back to their host pools without needing to delete and recreate them. Orphaned RDSH hosts in RDSH and AVD host pools are automatically reassociated, while VDI host pools include a console option for manual reassignment, allowing faster recovery from anomalies.
User experience
Parallels RAS 21.0 introduces multiple user experience enhancements designed to deliver a more seamless, reliable, and consistent interaction for end users. The reconnect experience has been improved with clear visual feedback, displaying a greyed-out desktop while sessions are being restored after network interruptions, extending the smooth reconnect behavior previously available for published applications and ensuring a unified experience.
A new policy-driven URL redirection feature for the user portal (web client) automatically redirects users to a new farm during migrations or maintenance, eliminating the need for manual bookmark updates and reducing support calls.
On the client front, Parallels Client for Windows now supports the Microsoft Windows App for connecting to AVD resources, aligning with Microsoft’s roadmap ahead of the Remote Desktop App deprecation in March 2026 to ensure uninterrupted access. If you are using an IGEL endpoint, centralized management has been enhanced with autologin credentials and automatic client launch on boot, providing seamless startup and transparent interoperability with IGEL third-party agents.
And finally, in the user experience category, mobile clients benefit from improved local resource redirection controls, offering an intuitive interface for sound, clipboard, camera, and other settings, ensuring parity with the flexibility available on the Parallels desktop clients.
Security and control
Parallels RAS 21.0 introduces several new security features designed to protect credentials, enhance authentication context, and provide administrators with more granular control, enhancing its overall security posture.
First, the Parallels Client for Windows integrates with the Windows Credential Manager, providing a more secure and seamless way to store and manage user credentials.
Multi-factor authentication has also been enhanced by capturing the client’s public IP address and passing it as a RADIUS attribute during MFA authentication, allowing enforcement of IP-based security policies, contextual access controls, and improved auditing across all native clients, the User Portal, and web connections. The public IP can be captured by selecting Parallels’ new IP lookup service, a third-party IP lookup service, or an on-premises/self-hosted lookup service.
This release introduces conditional RADIUS automation that provides rule-based, user-specific authentication responses, ensuring that access is tailored to the right users under the right conditions.
Also introduced in version 21.0 is fine-grained clipboard redirection control that enables administrators to precisely define allowed clipboard content types and data flow direction. This feature comes with advanced options for storing remote clipboard data locally and synchronizing it across Windows devices, delivering both security and user productivity benefits.
Cost and accessibility
With Parallels RAS 21.0, enterprises gain a decisive advantage in managing cloud costs through the new Cloud Cost Insight Dashboard. This value-added and powerful capability provides complete visibility into Azure Virtual Desktop consumption, enabling IT decision-makers to take control of their spend, spot opportunities for cost-saving, and validate the cost value of Parallels RAS.
By converting raw cost data into actionable intelligence, organizations can align IT spending with business objectives, optimize resource utilization, and easily demonstrate ROI. Accessibility has also been enhanced with a focus on inclusive design and compliance. The Web Client and User Portal are being consistently evaluated and updated based on Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) 2.5 guidance to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA conformance.
This entails generating updated Accessibility Conformance Reports and applying key enhancements to support users with visual or motor impairments, ensuring that Parallels RAS remains usable and equitable for all users in diverse enterprise environments.
Why it matters
Parallels RAS 21.0 delivers benefits across teams with a single upgrade.
Platform and IT operations can adopt Hyper-V for Windows Server 2025 without blockers, right-size Secure Gateway capacity, and side-step provisioning pitfalls with integrated checks and recovery.
Security and compliance can move secrets into the OS credential store, enable IP-aware MFA with RADIUS, including conditional flows, and enforce precise clipboard governance across Windows, while finance and cloud ops expose and verify AVD savings through the Cloud Cost Insight Dashboard.
End-user productivity is guaranteed during network blips with clear reconnect visuals and seamless farm migrations that don’t require them to update bookmarks.
What’s next: Try the Public Technical Preview
Be among the first to experience Parallels RAS 21.0 in your own environment and verify enhancements to scalability, security, and user experience.
Start your trial of the Public Technical Preview of Parallels RAS 21.0 now
