Running Virtual Machines in the Background (head-less mode)

Parallels Desktop Enterprise Edition allows to run virtual machines as background processes without the graphical user interface displayed on the Mac desktop. This is sometimes called the head-less mode. Parallels Desktop is also run as a background process (service) in this mode and is able to start the virtual machines automatically on Mac startup.

With this functionality you can run multiple virtual machines on a single high-performance Mac providing virtual machine access to your users. The users can connect to their designated virtual machines via VNC, RDP, SSH, or other remote tools.

This chapter describes how to set up and run Parallels Desktop and the virtual machines as background processes.