Sharing Your Parallels Desktop Virtual Machine Between Multiple Mac User Accounts
Guest blog by Dhruba Jyoti Das, Parallels Support Team
Your home may be packed with more than one Mac plus other devices, but if you’re like a lot of other households, you have a central “family” Mac. This is the computer located in a high-traffic area such as the living room, kitchen, etc. Each family member has access to this Mac and uses it for everyday tasks like checking email, having a quick FaceTime chat with a friend or relative, accessing recipes, streaming music to AirPlay devices around the home, and looking things up on the Internet.
Although you can configure this Mac so that it has just a single account, you can make it more enjoyable for each family member to use (and easier for you to control) by creating separate user accounts. When you do that, everyone has a place to save their stuff, keep personal settings, etc.
If you have Parallels Desktop installed on this Mac, you might want to share your virtual machines with the other Mac user accounts. Today I’m going to shed some light on how this sharing process works.
You can share VMs in two different ways.
Method 1
Follow these steps if you want to create a new VM that is accessible from all the user accounts on your Mac:
Click on File → New → Select the type of VM you would like to install → Under Name & Location, check the option “Share with other users of this Mac”. Choose Proceed and follow the rest of the on-screen instructions. Yes, it’s that easy!
The new VM will automatically be created in the /Users/Shared/Parallels directory, and all necessary permissions will be granted to the other users of your Mac.
This VM can also be used by different Mac accounts sequentially. For example, if one user suspends the VM and logs out, the VM will be suspended for the next user, who will have to resume the VM to continue work.
Now, let’s discuss the other way to share a VM.
Method 2
You already have a VM installed, and now you’ve decided to share it with the rest of the user accounts on your Mac.
This process might seem a bit trickier, but it’s not that complex. Check out the steps below:
- Open the Parallels Desktop Control Center, right-click on your VM in the list, and choose “Open in Finder”.
- When the Finder window opens, you need to move the VM’s bundle (.pvm file) to the /Users/Shared/Parallels folder.
- Once the .pvm file is moved to the new location, your VM will appear to be unavailable in the Control Center (It will have a question mark on it). Right-click on it, select Locate, and choose the new path to your .pvm file we talked about above.
In order to give the other users access to the same VM, you need to set the correct permissions. You can choose the exact user accounts to share your VM with (in case you might not want to share it with all the users). To do that:
- Launch Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and type in the following command:
cd /Users/Shared/Parallels
Hit Enter.
- Now, to share the VM, enter the following command (don’t hit Enter yet!):
sudo chmod -R og+rwx /
And drag and drop your VM’s .pvm file from Finder to the Terminal window. The whole command will look similar to this one:
Hit Return, enter your Mac account password when prompted, and press Enter again.
Note: Terminal will not display the actual symbols you’re typing. Just enter the password and hit Return.
- Now if you want to share your VM only with specific user accounts, you just need to execute a similar command in Terminal (wait, don’t hit Return right away):
sudo chmod -R +a "user_account allow file_inherit,directory_inherit,list,add_file,search,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity" /path_to_virtual machine
Let’s say you want to share the VM with your brother, and his Mac user account name is “Rob.” In that case, the command would look like this:
sudo chmod -R +a "Rob allow file_inherit,directory_inherit,list,add_file,search,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity"
Finally, drag and drop your .pvm file to the Terminal window and hit Return.
You will be asked to type the Mac password. Type it in and hit Return.
You can also create user accounts for Windows if you share a single VM with other people. Each person will have their own Windows account and customize their accounts with their own settings and preferences. To do this, just follow this Microsoft knowledge base article.
We hope you enjoyed this post on sharing your VM with other Mac users. If you find these tips helpful, please share the post with your friends and don’t forget to follow the Parallels Support team on Twitter!
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