shared Parallels between users account

How can I set up Parallels 5 so it can be use by family in another login account when using Fast User Switch on my mac?

Thank you,

BigBlaze

 

You can't

I have spent a lot of time back and forth with support on this. V3 and V4 can't do this. I saw nothing in the release notes for V5 that indicate that they addressed it at all even though I was told that they were working on improving it. I was never able to get any information from support indicating that V5 made any changes in this area. So my guess is you are out of luck.

Actually V3 had better behaviour than V4. In V3, they somehow locked the VM file so a second Mac user was prevented from trying to start the VM if it was running under another user. V4 removed that protection. If a second Mac user tries to start a VM that's already running, you get a black screen with an error stating that it can't access the hard disk. When switch to the Mac user login that has it running, you will see (much to your dismay) the same black screen and error message. So the attempt to start actually hoses the running VM. V3 did not do this. What is worse is that the only way to get the VM back again is to reboot the Mac. Quitting and restarting parallels will NOT let you restart the VM without a MacOS reboot.

So I never bought V5. As I mentioned above, I have every reason to believe that the same problems exist in V5. If this has been addressed in V6, I will buy the upgrade as this is a source of never ending headache between me and my wife.

What would be nice is if you could bring up the VM outside of the context of a Mac login ID. But there is no way to do that (unless V6 introduces that).

Bill

 

What about Version 6?

Is it still impossible to share a Parallels 6.0 VM between Mac OX user accounts? How do I move a VM from one Mac OS X account to another?

 

See http://kb.parallels.com/en/4721. It worked for me with Version 6.0.