Managing the Parallels Desktop Service

You can manage the Parallels Desktop service using launchctl , the standard OS X command line utility that allows to manage daemons, applications, processes, etc. The name of the Parallels Desktop service is com.parallels.desktop.launchdaemon . See usage examples below.

Examples of using launchctl:

To see if the Parallels Desktop service is running:

$ sudo launchctl list | grep parallels

8421  - com.parallels.desktop.launchdaemon

To stop the Parallels Desktop service:

$ sudo launchctl stop com.parallels.desktop.launchdaemon

To start the service

$ sudo launchctl start com.parallels.desktop.launchdaemon

If Parallels Desktop is running as a service and you want to change the Parallels Desktop or a virtual machine preferences (or you simply want to see a virtual machine window), you can open the Parallels Desktop application (the graphical user interface) at any time by double-clicking the Parallels Desktop icon. While the application is running, you can work with it as usual. When you are done, you can close the virtual machine window and the Parallels Desktop application. The Parallels Desktop service will keep running in the background. The virtual machine will keep running if configured to do so (described in the previous sections of this document).

You can also view and modify Parallels Desktop and virtual machine settings using the standard Parallels Desktop command line tools. This may be helpful if you can't access the Mac directly (e.g. it is located in a different building, it doesn't have a monitor and keyboard, etc.). Simply connect to the Mac using SSH (or some other client) and use the prlsrvctl utility to manage Parallels Desktop and prlctl utility to manage virtual machines. The documentation for both utilities is included with Parallels Desktop and is available via command line.

If Parallels Desktop is running as a service and you want to change it to run as an application, open the Parallels Desktop application (by double clicking the Parallels Desktop icon) and modify the Start Parallels Desktop as a service option as described in the previous section. Restart the Parallels Desktop application for the changes to take effect.