Using Parallels for mac without being logged on

I wonder, if there is a possibilty to start a virtual machine in the background without being logged on at my mac. I want to start a windows machine whenever the mac is turned on, but it should run without user interaction (just for a database). is this possible?

 

which guest operating system?

unwise to use windows without log ons
but you could make a script to run just after start up

see
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/applescript/

Hugh W

 

Guest System should be WinXP

The guest System Should be Win XP or Win 2000 Server. The thing is, that this system should be used as a server, so i should run whenever the mac runs (also without a logged on user)

 

But currently parallels has to create a window for the VM so if no user is logged on to the mac, then the app won't be able to create the window, so I doubt an apple script that launces parallels at mac boot time would work, as suggested by Hugh.

My guess would be that you'd need a specific server version of Parallels that ran GUI-less, so we could just remote desktop in to Windows or VNC to linux or whatever OS you were using.

I'd really like to see this functionality, and I think VMWare has this ability for its Linux and Windows applications so it may get added to Fusion at some point.

Cheers

Russell

 

Hi Russell,

yes i think this must be the way to go. Do you know, if parallels is planning such a feature or if this feature is at the wishlist?

 

I've no idea if they are. I'm not to worried who provides this feature, VMWare or Parallels, as currently I prefer Parallels over fusion because of coherence etc.

If the OS is running as a virtual server, then you aren't going to get coherence anyway, so performance is more of an issue in that case. VMWare already can already make use of both cores of a Core Duo, and Parallels is rumored to be working on this, so either would suite me for a virtual server environment.

Cheers

Russell

 

I don't understand the motivation. If you're using it w/o logging on, why not just use Boot Camp?

 

easy: i want to use the mac as mac. Windows should run in the background for some "special" operations, mainly database. I would use remote desktop to control it.

 

if you dont want to use the mac interactively, why not have it auto login, start parallels and then lock the screen .. thus you will be able to ssh etc to the mac and rdp to parallels.

 

I'm not aware of a way with OS X to have the screen saver lock as soon as you login in, so that there is no way for some one at the machine to move the mouse or something after a boot, and prevent the screen saver from starting, therefore gaining access to the system.

Plus, a server version could be less resource hungry as the graphics card etc could be a bare minimum and not have to allocate as many resources (but thats an implementation detail and I'm no expert in virtualisation).

I'd still rather wait for a dedicated server version though anyway.

Cheers

Russell

 

This is just an idea and I'm a hair short on Unix technical knowledge so this may be a naive thought, but why not simply set up a whole other user account that has access to nothing but parallels and set the icon to startup?

You can have more than one user going at the same time. You should still be able to ssh in. That would probably be the only way you could access it though.

Since you could go through and limit that account's access all to heck it could also have the advantage of allowing you to keep the nasty insecure microstuff away from your files.