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

Question

• I have an external mass storage (USB flash drive, hard drive or solid state drive) and I want to store and run my virtual machine (VM) from it. How do I do that?
• I store my virtual machine at Network Attached Storage (NAS) and I want to run my virtual machine (VM) from it.

Answer

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

• Creating, removing or reverting to snapshots
• Suspend or resume of 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:

• Flash Drive on Thunderbolt
• Flash Drive on USB 3.0
• Flash Drive on USB 2.0
• Rotational Drive on Thunderbolt
• Rotational Drive on USB 3.0

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.