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.
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.
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’.
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.
SCCMentor - Paul Winstanley 
Look forward to this series. I will also download trial version and check out at home lab.
could you clarify if the feature table considers only conventional agent based device management, or you’ve also compared products based on functionality available when you deploy CM for MDM (either on-prem or Intune hybrid)?
Michael,
The product manages only on-prem Mac devices (not MDM). The product uses its own agent for management of the devices. This will be discussed in another post in the blog series. Cheers Paul
Hi Paul, thanks for this great post, i really look forward to the next one of these series.
Macs become more important in our enviroment so i want to take a look into paralles, and it’s good if someone has allready done a good documentation about it.
Reblogged this on System Center.