Connecting a Windows Virtual Machine to a Network and the Internet

It's very likely that you'll want to connect your virtual Windows to a local network and to the Internet. The good news is that because your Windows installation is actually running within an application, namely Parallels Desktop for Mac, it takes its network and Internet connections from the Mac on which it is running. So, as long as your Mac is connected to a network and the Internet, you don't need to do anything else to be able to access network and Internet resources from the Windows environment. The Parallels Desktop for Mac application will take care of all the details for you. You'll be ready to run Internet applications and access network resources as soon as you run Windows in a VM.

Note

If you haven't set your Mac up for network or Internet access, see my book Special Edition Using Mac OS X Tiger for help.

Although your Windows environment gets its connection from the Mac, from the network's perspective, it is a separate environment. For example, the virtual Windows environment will have its own IP address just as it would if that copy of Windows were running on a separate PC. This enables you to do some useful things, such as using standard network file-sharing tools to share files between environments on the same Mac and with the Windows environment and different computers on the same network (you'll learn about this in the last section of this chapter).