Parallels MAC (Hardware) Address

Does anyone know precisely how the MAC address used by Parallels is generated?

Since build 3188 and OS 10.4.9, when I image multiple MBP C2D's and then launch Parallels on each machine, they all report the same MAC address. Although it's easily remedied by either manually changing the MAC addy or deleting/re-adding a Network Adapter (which appears to generate a random MAC addy), this is a new and BIG problem vs. large, group deployment.

Thanks in advance.

 

Mac address in Parallels are user changable. After you select a VM from the list, before starting it, click the Network Adapter you what to change its Mac addres and click the Advanced tag.

 

It's obvious that the MAC can be changed, but how is it generated in the first place?

 

MAC addresses are not generated. They are purchased from IEEE in blocks. Parallels simply picks one from its block and writes it out to the .pav file at the time a VM is created. If you are doing mass distribution of VM image, you might want to write a script to modify each image's .pav file so that each one will have a different Mac.

 

Or you can use locally assigned MAC addresses, see http://www.certsoft.com/mac.htm

 

Thanks for the help! It looks like scripting may be the way to go.

Curiously, I imaged 150+ MBP C2D's running 10.4.8 and Parallels build 3036 (beta), and when each end user booted up Parallels, they all had a different MAC address. This is similar to what VPC did on PPC PBooks - even though they were all rendered from a static image, somehow when the application started up, etc. it generated a random MAC.

Now with 10.4.9 and Parallels build 3188, all my end users have the same MAC.