Hi All! I have recently updated to Big Sur however my copy of parallels does not seem to be able to open. I get the message Parallels Desktop cannot be started because some of the required components are missing from the operating system of your Mac. I desperately need my windows vm to do my work while I have to work from home and cant access any of the programs I need as it stands. Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance!
It should work. Have you upgraded Parallels to the latest release?. It needs to be pretty modern to work correctly with Big Sur, and in fact the latest update to 16.1.1, fixes a couple of issues I was having. Uninstall Parallels. Go to the application folder, select the 'Parallels desktop', right click and move to trash. Then install the latest release (http://www.parallels.com/directdownload/pd16). This should clean up whatever is wrong with the install.
For me Parallels 16 has been a disaster on macOS Big Sur. My Windows 10 VM works normally, but my Mac VMs hang on login. I have tried this with Mac VMS running both macOS Catalina and macOS Big Sur. The behavior is exactly the same. The systemuiserver process hangs, which prevents Finder from launching. The only workaround for this that I have is to launch the last snapshot instead of booting up the VM normally. Parallels support has not yet provided a fix for this problem, and the latest version of Parallels (16.1.1) does not fix this. This is a huge problem. I run Mac VMs for creating software packages, and testing software and MDM policies. Fortunately, I have not yet upgraded my other Mac, so I can still get work done. When I'm out working away from my home office, it's a problem. I'm very disappointed that Parallels obviously did not do any QA on using Mac vms in Parallels on macOS Big Sur. I found that VMware Fusion does not have this problem. Actually, the Mac VMs run even better than on Parallels.
Have you selected the Apple hypervisor rather than the Parallels one?. I have currently Mojave, High Sierra, Win10 64 bit, Win10 32 bit, Linux, and Windows XP, merrily all running under PD16.1.1, on Big Sur. My only issue is with Big Sur itself, which is appallingly bad. I've actually had to go back to booting Catalina to actually make the machine usable. For example, booting takes over 5 minutes into Big Sur, versus under 20 seconds into Catalina. Apple support said that I should go back to Catalina, and admitted they had major problems with Big Sur, and predicted it'd be some months before they were fixed....
For me Big Sur hasn't been bad at all. It killed a service that I use for work, but I expected it to since the app attached to that service used a kernel extension. That has been resolved so I'm back in. I have used Parallels for over 14 years, starting with my first Intel Mac. If Big Sur has been this problematic for you, there was likely something wrong before your upgrade. That said, I suggest that you go into your Library folder. Look for Caches, and delete everything in the Caches folder. After that, reboot. This may not fix the booting issue but it may fix other things. I did this for a client last week and it completely solved the severe sluggishness she was having.
After the initial problems, I did a clean install, including reformatting. Problem remained. It even shows it during the Big Sur boot during install. It is an issue with certain hardware combinations. Apple admitted that on some machines Big Sur is not working correctly. The funny thing is I have an I7 iMac, and this is fine with Big Sur. However my iMac Pro (Xeon 10 core, 4TB SSD), is the one that doesn't want to work properly....
