Parallels Desktop on External Drive? How?

P

PaulC30

Junior Member
Does anyone have any tips for running Parallels Desktop on External Drive?

I am a Mac M1 Max user and would like a small Windows Parallels set up, but would prefer this to be on an External drive as I wouldn't be using it every day.
I have heard that this is now a thing, and that its possible to do this, say with an external SSD drive?

Are there any walkthroughs on doing this, does Windows also reside on the External drive?

Any help would be great before I try the PD19 demo.
thanks
 
Yep, the steps are pretty simple:
1. Create a Windows virtual machine (VM).
2. Shut down Windows (Actions > Shut down).
3. Locate the virtual machine file as outlined at https://kb.parallels.com/117333.
4. Move the .pvm file of the VM to the external drive (just copy/paste it).
5. Double-click the .pvm file on your external drive to register it in Parallels Desktop Control Center.
It's done!
Note: don't forget to shut down Windows before unplugging the drive from your Mac since it might cause the corruption of the VM (since if the VM is running and you unplug the drive from your Mac, it results in the interrupted I/O operations of the virtual hard drive).
 
Ok thanks, so are you saying to create a normal Parallels Desktop on the main drive and move it afterwards instead of doing this direct to an exteranl drive?

Secondly I think Windows XP is no longer supported? and its just Windows 11 now? (I only need an old VM to use with my older Windows programs)
 
I copied the Windows .pvm file that has 52 GB to an external drive and deleted the original file. It's working, but the internal disk did not have free space increased by 52 GB. What happens?
 
Only on the next day the space appeared. I had emptied the trash, restarted the system more than once and did not see the space increase. As you said, some cache should stick around for a while.
But...
After using it for a day, I put the Windows VM back on the main disk, because all Windows programs took a long time to start and even froze at times.
Thanks
 
Hi Matthew
It's a slow USB 3.0 disk - Seagate Expansion. I put XCode and some Adobe applications on it and run without problems. The dd command reports a transfer speed around 30MB/s ...
 
DavidH49 said:
Can this procedure be used to move an existing .pvm file from my macbook to an external drive?
Click to expand...
You can try by copying the existing .PVM file to an external drive, right click on the moved .PVM file and select Open With Parallels and see if it works. 10 minutes of work and you'll have your answer.
 
This works for Parallels 19 and Windows 11. Had the same doubt and tried it this afternoon.
LeRoi said:
You can try by copying the existing .PVM file to an external drive, right click on the moved .PVM file and select Open With Parallels and see if it works. 10 minutes of work and you'll have your answer.
Click to expand...
 
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