Over a series of blog posts I’m going to be taking a look at managing Macintosh devices via the third party application Parallels Mac Management for SCCM. The Parallels product embellishes Macintosh Management within SCCM beyond what native Mac support in ConfigMgr is offering. Parallels have a simple datasheet that highlights these features in concise detail, let’s take a look at the current feature set against native. Quite an impressive list of features.
Parallels Desktop 7 For Mac not only integrates with many of the new features in Lion, such as Launchpad and full-screen apps, the folks at Parallels have also been tweaking the code to provide higher performance, both in the basic virtualization application and in graphics performance. Parallels Server for Mac 4.0 Mac mini Edition is now available from the virtualization experts. The solution has been optimized for Mac minis running Mac OS X Server software, Parallels said today. This week, TUAW covered Parallels’ release of the Parallels Server for Mac 4.0 Mac mini Edition. As the only server virtualization solution optimized for Apple server hardware, it offers up to 2 virtual machines with 2 virtual CPUs and 4GB of RAM, support for 32-bit and 64-bit platforms, and shared folders for Windows, Linux and Mac OS guest OSs.
Notice that the product works without PKI infrastructure within the ConfigMgr environment, native support requires the use of PKI and HTTPS based roles. Parallels does support PKI though if you want to use this.
The Parallels product doesn’t require the ConfigMgr client to be installed, it uses its own client for managing the devices and a set of roles are required to be installed for this management to take place. These are:
- The Configuration Manager Console Extension
- The Configuration Manager Proxy
- The NetBoot Server
- The OS X Sofware Update Point
- The MDM Server
In Part One, I will be undertaking the task of installing the Configuration Manager Console Extension
The Configuration Manager Console Extension
The Configuration Manager Console Extension extends the SCCM console enabling you to manage Mac OS X devices. To install the Parallels Configuration Manager Console Extension the pre-requisites are simple, you must install on a computer that has the admin console installed. In the tutorial below I have installed the extension on my site server.
Parallels For Mac Help
To get hold of a trial installation of Parallels Mac Management for SCCM go to http://www.parallels.com/uk/products/mac-management/ and ‘Request a trial’.
Parallels For Mac For Server Administration Fundamentals
You’ll be provided with a trial key and download links by the Parallels team. Once downloaded, run the ‘Parallels Mac Management for SCCM.exe’ installation file.
Click Next.
Accept the licence agreement and click Next.
From the list of Parallels features choose the Console Extension and click Next.
At this stage we are ready to install the extension. Click Install.
Moments later the install will complete. Click Finish to complete the installation.
If you load up the console you’ll see that the Parallels extension features have now been added to various workspaces. Here’s an example in the Administration workspace.
Note at this stage you’ll receive a moan from the System Tray that the Parallels Mac Management for SCCM Problem Monitor has failed to locate a SCCM proxy. Well at this stage we haven’t installed the proxy so that’s to be expected.
I’ll be moving on to the installation of the proxy in Part 2 of the Parallels Mac Management for SCCM blog series.