Multi Seat feature (multiple user at the same Mac with individual mouses and keyboards)

[RainerD3]

The term "multi seat" means that one PC provides multiple workspaces for different persons. Macs and Windows PC do not allow this today: they support multiple monitors, but not for different persons.

Today's Macs (e.g. Mac mini) with multiple monitors (2-3) are powerful enough to be used by several persons at the same Mac. When multiple Parallel VMs are started and shown at different screens, it should be possible to assign different mouses and keyboards (USB) to different VMs. Hence, multiple persons can share the same Mac and run independent VMs. This saves lots of hardware cost. Parallels Desktop today does not allow to assign a mouse to a dedicated VM resulting in having multiple mouses and keyboards acting independently at the same time across different VMs.

I see this as a killer feature for Parallels. The assignment dialogues are already there, but Parallels does not support multiple mouses and keyboards independently.

VMWare supports this already since version 8, but their linking of mouses/keyboards with VMs is lost after restarting VMWare. Parallels should do better.

Best regards
Rainer

 

[alev]

Did you try to setup this? Can you please share more details on the aspect that is not working?

When I have a spare keyboard/mouse I can permanently assign them to the selected VM in Parallels Desktop Preferences. So for the assignment part of the setup is working.

I can't assign internal keyboard and mouse though, this is prohibited due to the fact that people used to do it by mistake, and then can't use their Mac.
I also didn't test it on Mac Mini.

 

[RainerD3]

Yes, I tried this. What you describe works nice, the configuration is well prepared. But when you do the same with a second optical mouse and attach it to a second virtual machine, you do not get a second mouse pointer within the second VM independently from the first mouse pointer. The second mouse disappears. Similar with keyboards: you cannot use both keyboards in parallel at the same time independently.

I discussed this with the Parallels support and they responded: Parallels support: "You can only use one mouse and keyboard on your virtual machines. You cannot use it on two screen separately. We do not have any update on this. You can suggest it as a feature request in the below Parallels forum link."

Here I am.

 

[TomasI1]

That's actually a really neat idea and such feature could definitely make sense for some people, myself included.