VMworld Europe 2008 Coverage

Parallels Offers Their Take on Virtualization

In a market so heavily dominated by VMware, it may be surprising to see another company trying to offer its own hardware virtualization solutions. Mainly targeting SMBs and the home market with their product line, Parallels wants to make virtualization available to everyone, providing a range of products in several types of virtualization.

From their point of view, virtualization has served two important goals so far:

1. Development and Testing: Due to its perfectly isolated nature, OS-based hardware virtualization is perfect for this. It provides a solid playground for developers looking for a safe and realistic environment where they can unleash their applications.
   
2. Consolidation: This is where hypervisor-based virtualization comes in, allowing for efficient and flexible consolidation of legacy systems, bundling together of small-footprint servers, and powerful management of all these virtual machines.

While Parallels does offer products for both kinds of virtualization, where they really want to make a difference is in what they view as the next big step in virtualization: Providing a platform for what they call the "Virtualized Data Center", making use of VDI and Hosted IT in combination with the two above technologies.

To accomplish this, they are currently building a suite of tools to support this way of working on as many platforms as possible: Mac users may already be familiar with their OS-based hardware virtualization software known as Parallels Desktop for Mac, while Parallels Workstation has been available for Windows and Linux users for a while now.

Paired with their freshly introduced Parallels Server platform and the newly acquired Virtuozzo OS virtualization software, they believe they can cover all bases perfectly. Parallels Server will be available for all platforms and is hypervisor-based. On top of that, it will also be able to run OS X Server virtualized, making it the very first virtualization solution in which this is possible (and allowed).

To provide full integration between these products and even third-party solutions, the company is working hard on a full range of automation products, aiming for a powerful and centralized management system.

Parallel's view of the virtualization market and how their products fit into every category.