Parallels Making Advances in Virtualization

Parallels, Inc. is making great strides to bring their vision of virtualization to market. Not afraid of its larger competitors, the company continues to move forward with advancements to its desktop offerings and is adding server class virtualization and management to its virtualization repertoire.

The company recently announced that it had released a “Feature Update” to its Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac, their award-winning desktop virtualization product that allows Mac users to run Windows and Linux at the same time as Mac OS X on a single Mac desktop without the need for reboot.

This new update improves the product’s already tight integration of Windows applications into the Mac OS X desktop. Windows applications running in Coherence mode on the OS X desktop behave more like native Mac applications. It also now offers full integration with OS X’s “Expose” feature. So when expose is activated, each Parallels Coherence window appears as a separate Window, displayed with its full contents, enabling users to select a Windows application individually. Individual windows can be minimized in the Dock and can also be stacked and tiled.

The update also adds the ability to mirror the Desktop, Documents and Media on either desktop. And Parallels Explorer now recognizes suspended virtual machines, so users can automatically mount a virtual machine’s hard disk even if the virtual machine is powered off. Desktop 3.0 also gets improved performance under heavy workloads and more efficient resource management. And users can now allocate up to 2GB of memory to an individual virtual machine.

And although Parallels has achieved a huge land grab within the Mac desktop market, they aren’t satisfied with stopping there. Instead, while at VMworld, Ben Rudolph, Director of Communications at Parallels, showed me how the company is preparing to enter the server market with their new Parallels Server software product that is currently in Alpha. Parallels Server is going to act as a standalone hypervisor on bare-metal as well as a virtualization layer that sits on top of a host operating system. Unlike other hosted virtualization platforms, Parallels Server will also be able to install on top of Mac OS X which will bring server class virtualization to Apple’s XServe line of servers.

To further separate them from the competition, Rudolph told me that the company ultimately plans to offer a tight integration between their hypervisor virtualization and parent company SWsoft’s Virtuozzo container-level virtualization. While not in the company’s initial product, the vision is there to allow a customer to move a live system running in Virtuozzo to a Parallels Server virtual machine. As an example, if a customer is using and getting the benefits of Virtuozzo’s container virtualization but needs to upgrade only one instance to a newer service pack level, they can live migrate that instance over to a Parallels virtual machine to upgrade it and then continue to operate it as a virtual machine.

To reach this bold vision, Rudolph said that the company plans on bringing their hypervisor into Beta within the next four to six weeks. And the company plans on shipping the final product sometime near the end of this year or the beginning of 2008. They also plan on revisiting and updating their Windows and Linux desktop virtualization product called Workstation within the next few months.

By leveraging their Mac OS X capabilities, their fast and agile development and their parent company’s container virtualization product, Parallels has a number of ways of differentiating themselves from the pack and bringing attention to their offerings.