How to run a virtual machine from network or external mass storage

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Having a virtual machine stored on external mass storage or NAS places limitations to some of the operations you may perform with the VM:


NOTE: we highly recommend you having a backup of your VM, as in some conditions like low network speed unstable connection or external storage I/O speed, due to a high read/write operations frequency (installing Windows updates or upgrading/repairing Operating System) guest File System may be damaged to unrecoverable data loss.

Performance of non-locally stored virtual machines is also depends on a network capacity.


We recommend you use the following types of external mass storage devices:

How to transfer a virtual machine to required destination

  1. Make sure the VM is shut down.

  2. Locate the virtual machine on your Mac.

    Note: in order to transfer a Boot Camp partition, see KB 113658

    By default virtual machine files are saved either to the Documents/Parallels folder inside your user folder, or at /Users/Shared/Parallels.

    Parallels Desktop virtual machines have a .pvm extension

  3. Copy or move the .pvm file to the desired destination.

    • Double-click on the .pvm file to start your virtual machine.

    NOTE: If you want to run a VM from NTFS-formatted partition, you need to install NTFS driver for your Mac.

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