Parallels Desktop Business Edition Administrator's Guide v19 - Restricting a Virtual Machine Configuration with a Custom Password

Restricting a Virtual Machine Configuration with a Custom Password

Parallels Desktop Business Edition provides you with the ability to protect the configuration of a virtual machine with a custom password. When a password is set, even a local Mac administrator will be required to enter it in order to modify virtual machine settings.

Using the Parallels Desktop graphical user interface to set the password

To set a password in the Parallels Desktop graphical user interface:

Open Parallels Desktop and select a virtual machine.
On the Parallels Desktop menu bar, select Actions > Configure to open the virtual machine configuration dialog.
Select Security.
Click the Custom password: Turn On... button.
Enter a password, then enter it again to verify and click OK.

To change or remove the password:

To change the password, click the Change Password button and follow the instructions on the screen.
To remove the password, click Custom password: Turn Off and follow the instructions on the screen.

If the password is set and the user tries to view or modify the virtual machine configuration, they will be required to enter this custom password.

Using the command line utility to set the password

In addition to the graphical user interface, you can use the prlctl command-line utility to set a custom password for editing the virtual machine configuration.

To set the password, type the following command in Terminal:

prlctl set "vm_name" --custom-pwd

where vm_name is the virtual machine name in quotes. You'll be asked to enter a password and then confirm it.

To change or remove the password, type the same command as above:

prlctl set "vm_name" --custom-pwd

You'll be asked to enter the current password and then a new password.

To view the current protection status for a virtual machine, type the following command:

prlctl list "vm_name" -i

In the output, search for the Security section and look at the Custom password protection property. It will be either set to "on" or "off".

Using the mass deployment process to set the password

If you are mass deploying Parallels Desktop and one or more virtual machines, you can simply set the custom password in the source virtual machine. When a virtual machine is deployed on Mac computers, the password will be retained.