Parallels is the best remote application and virtual desktop delivery software you have never heard of

We are a Cloud SAAS provider and are currently in the process of converting from using Microsoft RDS to Parallels RAS. We were looking for something that was more flexible across multiple OS and operating environments, that was more robust and faster then RDS and decided on Parallels over Citrix. It's currently in use for our internal users of the software and one client test company.

I have been admining Microsoft RDS for over five years now. It's a slow, clunky and limited UI with disparate servers and components that cannot be managed within RDS itself. Webpages have to be manually edited for instance. All of that goes away with Parallels. My favorite part of the entire product is the central control. It's incredibly intuitive, powerful, fast and covers every setting I want within a few clicks, whether it's altering gateway website layouts or publishing apps. And, it can be done without interfering with user connections or needing every session host in a farm up and running even if the load doesn't demand it. It fixes basically all of the problems with Microsoft's RDS platform.

We use it primarily for sales demos. Prospective clients are always impressed by the speed and seamless integration with mobile products. It still has some limitations with copy/paste that have prevented us from rolling it out to most users. But for the use cases where it works, it's fast easy and simple which is exactly the way we like it.

We host 100% within AWS using EC2 instances running Windows or Linux. Parallels has run without issues in that environment and has worked perfectly with AMIs and snapshots when testing DR scenarios. The load balancers in AWS have worked well with the product as well. We implement SAP B1 as a remote published app and have been very impressed with the speed stability when using the application in Parallels.

We run multitenancy RDS farms so being able to integrate with Active Directory to maintain our basic security setup was very important. We have had no issues with the ability to publish farms and apps based on security groups are able to divide up our resources into secure collections exactly as we did before. The user access control levels are excellent. Implement SSL certificates on the login portal was incredibly easy as well. The integrated password reset functions for end-users work much better than Microsoft's own reset functionality. Once we go fully live with it, we will look at MFA. In testing the parallels implementation is easy enough to use that its actually a possibility for our client base now.