Parallels has announced the release of Parallels Desktop 17.1 for Mac, which adds full support for macOS Monterey and Windows 11.
“We’re very excited to announce Parallels Desktop 17.1 Update, which now fully supports macOS Monterey as a host OS and improves the user experience when running macOS Monterey in a VM on Apple M1 Mac,” Parallels’ Beatrice Vogel writes. “The latest update also includes improved Windows 11 virtual machine (VM) support and stability with the introduction of Virtual Trusted Platform Modules (vTPMs) by default for all future and past Windows 11 VMs.”
That latter bit is important, because Microsoft started enforcing Windows 11’s TPM requirement after it finalized the original release of Windows 11, and M1-based Mac users with Parallels Desktop 17—the first to support Windows 11—suddenly found themselves in the lurch. Parallels quickly issued a patch, but now the latest release of the products includes this more sustainable solution. (That said, M1 users still need to use a Windows Insider Preview version of Windows 11 since Microsoft refuses to officially support the ARM-based version of this OS on M1-based Macs.)
Other new features in Parallels Desktop 17.1 include Parallels Tools support for macOS Monterey VMs with copy and paste integration between the host and guest environments, support for more Windows games (including World of Warcraft, Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition, Tomb Raider 3, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, World of Tanks, Raft, and others), and support for accelerated 3D graphics in Linux via VirGL.