The orchestration layer for automating Mac Infrastructure
Run ephemeral virtual machines, manage golden images, orchestrate workloads across Mac hosts, and scale self-hosted CI/CD infrastructure from a single platform. Built on the Parallels Desktop virtualization engine your team already trusts, Parallels DevOps helps engineering organizations move beyond fragile scripts, manual VM management, and host-by-host operations.
Whether you’re running GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, Terraform workflows, or custom build systems, Parallels DevOps gives you the tools to build, test, and deploy with greater consistency, visibility, and control.
Beloved by DevOps, designed for efficiency
Parallels DevOps transforms your approach to virtual environments, saving time and boosting satisfaction—without the usual complexities.
"Of all the VM software I've used, it's been the most intuitive from the start. The graphics are also really good, which makes a huge difference when checking web responsiveness between Mac and Windows browsers."
Learn more"Parallels Desktop is used to run VMs locally on MacBook developer machines - most commonly to run Windows applications or to check bugs and code pertaining to Windows from the standard-issued MacBooks. This is important as, while development productivity is highest using MacBooks, our customers are more often using the UI tools on Windows for authoring tasks."
Learn more"I use Parallels Desktop to run older versions of Mac OS X on my MacBook Pro for the purposes of testing apps on older versions of Mac OS. Parallels does this job perfectly, by allowing me to easily boot up older versions of the OS at leisure. I also run Windows 10 in Parallels so I can use PC-only apps that are not available on OS X."
Learn moreBuilt for modern CI/CD infrastructure
Modern software teams have transformed how they build and ship software. Continuous integration, automated testing, infrastructure as code, and platform engineering have become standard practice.
Yet many organizations still manage Mac build infrastructure through a collection of point solutions focused on individual VM workflows, custom scripts built around prlctl, manually maintained images, and disconnected management tools. While these approaches may work for small deployments, they often become harder to scale, govern, and maintain as CI/CD infrastructure grows.
Build environments become harder to standardize. VM images drift over time. Critical orchestration logic ends up buried in custom scripts maintained by a small number of engineers. Capacity planning happens host by host, and troubleshooting often requires digging through logs, SSH sessions, and institutional knowledge.
What starts as a manageable setup for a handful of machines can quickly become an operational challenge as Mac infrastructure scales. Engineering leaders eventually begin asking the same questions:
- How much engineering time is spent maintaining CI infrastructure instead of delivering product features?
- What happens if the engineers maintaining custom orchestration tooling leave?
- How quickly can the team recover when build infrastructure fails?
- How efficiently is Mac hardware being utilized?
- How can teams standardize environments without slowing down developers?
Parallels DevOps was built to solve these problems.
Turn Mac virtualization into a modern platform
Parallels DevOps adds orchestration, automation, image management, APIs, and operational visibility on top of Parallels Desktop for Business and Enterprise.
Instead of managing individual VMs on individual hosts, teams gain a centralized platform for operating Mac-based virtual infrastructure at scale.
Every component is designed around a simple goal: making Mac infrastructure easier to operate, easier to scale, and easier to trust.
By bringing provisioning, orchestration, automation, and visibility into a single platform, Parallels DevOps helps teams work more efficiently across the software delivery lifecycle:
- Platform engineering teams can deliver self-service development environments on demand.
- QA and CI/CD teams can automate consistent test and build environments across macOS, Windows, and Linux.
- Infrastructure teams can monitor and manage fleet-wide VM infrastructure from a single control plane.
Start every build with a clean environment
One of the most common causes of CI/CD instability is environment drift.
Over time, build agents accumulate configuration changes, dependencies, patches, and temporary fixes that make troubleshooting increasingly difficult.
Parallels DevOps enables teams to run workloads inside ephemeral virtual machines that are created from approved images and discarded when work is complete.
Each job starts with a clean, predictable environment, helping teams improve reproducibility, simplify debugging, and reduce infrastructure-related failures.
Instead of asking whether the environment changed, teams can focus on the code itself.
Stop rebuilding build environments
Catalog Service
The Catalog Service transforms VM images into reusable, versioned assets that can be shared across development and CI/CD workflows.
Teams can create approved golden images, publish new versions, track image history, and distribute standardized environments through existing storage systems, including:
- Amazon S3
- Microsoft Azure Storage
- JFrog Artifactory
- MinIO
- Other compatible artifact repositories
The Catalog defines what should be deployed: approved, versioned VM images that teams can trust. The orchestration layer defines where and how those environments run across available infrastructure.
Together, they help teams standardize build environments, reduce configuration drift, accelerate environment provisioning, and improve governance across development and CI/CD workflows.
Every build starts from a known-good environment, and every team works from the same trusted foundation.
Put idle Mac hardware to work
Orchestrator Service
Managing individual hosts creates operational overhead and limits scalability.
The Orchestrator Service pools available Mac hosts into a centralized resource layer that intelligently distributes workloads across your infrastructure.
Instead of assigning jobs to specific machines, teams can dynamically schedule workloads across available infrastructure. The Orchestrator evaluates factors such as host health, resource availability, and VM readiness to help place workloads efficiently, while allowing teams to use host tags to guide placement for specialized hardware or workloads.
This helps organizations:
- Improve hardware utilization
- Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks
- Scale build capacity more efficiently
- Eliminate manual workload balancing
- Simplify fleet management
As demand changes, the platform continuously helps teams make better use of the Mac hardware they already own.
Key benefits for DevOps professionals
Faster troubleshooting
Reduce environment drift and improve reproducibility with ephemeral virtual machines.
Better infrastructure utilization
Pool Mac hosts and distribute workloads more efficiently across available hardware.
Consistent environments
Version and manage golden images through a centralized catalog.
Greater visibility
Monitor hosts, workloads, virtual machines, and infrastructure health from a single interface.
Automation-ready infrastructure
Integrate with CI/CD systems, platform engineering workflows, and custom tooling through APIs.
Lower operational overhead
Replace manual host management and fragile orchestration with centralized infrastructure management.
Open, extensible, and community-driven
Parallels DevOps includes prldevops, an Apache 2.0 licensed open-source agent that runs on each Mac host and connects infrastructure to the DevOps control plane. The platform follows a Fair Source approach that balances openness, flexibility, and sustainable development. Organizations can inspect, extend, and integrate the platform while benefiting from enterprise-grade infrastructure management and ongoing product innovation.
Flexible licensing
Parallels DevOps is designed to work alongside Parallels Desktop for Business and Parallels Desktop for Enterprise.
Organizations can use Parallels DevOps as part of their existing Parallels Desktop Business or Enterprise deployment, leveraging the virtualization platform they already trust.
By building on the Parallels Desktop foundation, teams can add orchestration, image management, automation, and fleet-level visibility to their Mac-based CI/CD infrastructure without introducing a separate virtualization stack.
Parallels Desktop DevOps services FAQs
Parallels DevOps is a platform for managing virtual machine-based CI/CD and development infrastructure on Mac hosts. It combines Parallels Desktop, ephemeral VMs, catalog-based images, fleet orchestration, APIs, and UI-based management into a centralized control plane.
Parallels Desktop provides the virtualization engine. Parallels DevOps adds orchestration, fleet management, image catalogs, APIs, scheduling, monitoring, and centralized administration capabilities.
Yes. Teams can launch fresh VMs for every build or workload, helping reduce environment drift and improve reproducibility.
Yes. Parallels DevOps integrates with common CI/CD and automation platforms, including Jenkins, GitLab CI, Terraform, Kubernetes, and custom tooling.
The Catalog Service provides versioned golden VM image management, enabling teams to create, publish, distribute, and govern approved virtual machine images.
The Orchestrator Service schedules workloads across available Mac hosts, helping teams improve utilization, balance capacity, and simplify infrastructure operations.
Modernize your Mac CI/CD infrastructure
Give your DevOps teams the tools they need to build, test, and scale with confidence.
Run ephemeral VMs. Manage golden images. Orchestrate workloads across your Mac fleet. Gain visibility into your infrastructure from a centralized control plane.
All powered by the Parallels Desktop engine your organization already trusts.