Parallels and Multiple Accounts

Hello, I have recently installed the trial version of Parallels and it seems to be very good. But before we buy the product we need one issue sorted, so I was hoping you guys could help.

Basically, we have two accounts, myself and my wife. We have a Mac i7 27" 2010 with Windows7 installed on Bootcamp, and Parallels points to that. What I have noticed is that if one account has windows running in parallels, the other account has no access until windows is shut down. Is there any workaround to this, whilst still pointing to the Bootcamp installation?

Or, will I need to create two seperate parallels Virtual operating systems of Windows (basically two seperate installations taking twice the space on the HD?)

If this is the case, how would this effect the software licensing, such as MS Office and windows7? I probably would have to have it installed twice and would MS want multiple licenses, despite being on the one machine?

Hmmm, on the other hand, I am wondering if I somehow installed Parallels onto say the shared folder, still pointing to Bootcamp, would the same instance be able to be used by both Users without having to shutdown windows?

Thanks in advance for your help :O)

 

Two virtual machines cannot use the same virtual hard disk at the same time (this goes for Boot Camp or normal .hdd disks).

You could run a single virtual machine on one account, switch to the other account, and connect to that virtual machine using Remote Desktop Connection.
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/remote-desktop-client

Maybe one day Parallels will add a feature that will allow Parallels Desktop to connect to an already running shared virtual machine.

 

Share VM. Not disk

What would be ideal is not to share disk(s) across two running VMs but to share one running VM across two Mac logins. Maybe by bringing it up outside the context of the Mac user login.

But I've given up waiting for that.