Network and External Drive Disconnects upon Mac Sleep

[JasonB9]

Hello. I recently upgraded Mac OS from Yosemite to Sierra. Immediately following upgrade I also upgraded from Parallels Desktop version 10 to version 12. I have been having two main problems within Parallels, and I assume they are related. After the Mac goes to sleep mode, the network connection within Parallels seems to disconnect. At the same time, an external hard drive that I use on the virtual machine will disconnect, despite me having its settings such that it is not supposed to do that. If anything is downloading on the VM and the Mac goes to sleep, the connection will sever. Connection works fine as long as it's in use and the Mac is not asleep. Both of these are problems that did not occur with previous versions of Mac OS and Parallels.

I have already uninstalled and reinstalled Parallels Tools, have restarted both VM and Mac several times, and have also changed energy saver preferences on Mac from display and computer sleep after 15 minutes to just display sleep after 15 minutes and computer sleep never. None of these things have worked. Does anybody have any suggestions?

Thank you

 

[Maria@Parallels]

Hi, you may try the following:
VM Configuration -> Options -> Startup and Shut down -> on Windows close - keep running on the background.

 

[JasonB9]

Thank you for the reply. Under the configuration, options, startup and shutdown, on window close I don't see the option for "keep running in the background". Right now there are three radio buttons (start up and shut down manually, always ready in the background, and custom). Custom is selected. Under that there are 4 items, one of which is "on window close". The options under that are "ask me what to do, suspend, shut down, and force to stop". I have "ask me what to do" selected. Could you let me know what you meant above? Thank you again for the help.

 

[Elric]

About "network disconnect" - it is by design, Parallels simulates disconnect of the network link at Mac-sleep and renews DHCP-address at wakeup.
The behaviour can be disabled by entering system flag at VM Configuration->Hardware->Boot:
devices.net.sleep_disconnects_link=0

 

[JasonB9]

Elric,
Thank you very much for the reply. Unfortunately this didn't seem to work either. Someone else had suggested a similar boot flag (devices.net.track_link_status=0) in the same location, and that didn't work either. I've attached some screen shots of both my Mac's network setup (ip addresses blocked out) and then configuration for the Parallels for both network adapter and the boot order. Is everything correct on the boot order in order for this to work?
As mentioned before, the issue is just when the mac (host) goes to sleep. Any network connection or downloads that are happening on the VM will be terminated once Mac sleep happens. Also, the external hard drive disconnects upon sleep. This behavior was not present in previous version of Mac OS and Parallels that I used.