How to Transfer an Existing Virtual Machine to Your New Mac


Guest blog by Manoj Raghu, Parallels Support Team


We’ve all been there. (Or we all hope we’ll be there!) You just opened a shiny new Mac with pristine Mac OS X and blank settings. Yes, Apple has its own migration assistant, but according to my experience, many customers prefer to start fresh. Wait—does that mean you’ll have to build your Parallels Desktop virtual machine again from, scratch too?

The good news is that you can easily move your VM to your new Mac—you won’t have to rebuild your Parallels Desktop VM from scratch. The better news is that you can even import your Boot Camp installation into a VM and move it to the new Mac.

By default, your VM is a single .pvm bundle located in Documents  Parallels folder by default. If you can’t find it there, search for it using Spotlight.

We do recommend shutting down Windows before following the instructions below.

First, let me walk you through how to transfer your existing VM using an external hard drive.

How to Transfer Existing VM Using External Hard Drive

Transfer existing VM to new Mac

Transfer existing VM to new Mac

Don’t have an external drive? No problem, you can also transfer your VM via network. Here’s how.

How to Transfer Existing VM via Network

Transfer existing VM to new Mac                                        

Is your VM based on a Boot Camp partition? This adds only one more step to our process of moving it to a new Mac. Before following the instructions above, import your Boot Camp partition to the VM as suggested in this article.

We hope this blog helped you transfer your existing VM to your new Mac! Enjoy your brand new Mac, and don’t forget to follow the Support team on Twitter for tips, tricks, and help.