Parallels announced today that it was going to open up its Beta 2 program for its Parallels Server product to the general public. Parallels Server is the first server virtualization platform to come out of Parallels, now famous for their desktop virtualization software on the Mac. The company announced the first round of beta testing only 2 months ago. And I knew back then that it wouldn't be long until the beta Parallels announced today that it was going to open up its Beta 2 program for its Parallels Server product to the general public. Parallels Server is the first server virtualization platform to come out of Parallels, now famous for their desktop virtualization software on the Mac. The company announced the first round of beta testing only 2 months ago. And I knew back then that it wouldn’t be long until the beta reached the general public. “We are extending beta testing to everyone based on the positive results from our closed beta,” said Corey Thomas, Vice President of Consumer and Business Marketing, Parallels. “Feedback has been that it is easy to install and use, reliable and fast. We’ve incorporated feature requests and fixes into this latest version and feel confident that it’s ready for a broader set of beta users to experience.” Ben Rudolph, Director of Corporate Communications at Parallels, was demonstrating the product while at VMworld Europe 2008. And it looks like the company has come a long way with it. The product performed very well on the Mac server that Rudolph was using. And with the Beta 2 release, the company has added a number of impressive features. Key among them: A Full Bare-metal Hypervisor that allows users to run multiple virtual machines directly on the host physical machine’s hardware. The company has been promising a bare-metal platform for some time now, and they are finally about to deliver on that promise. An Integrated Toolset that enhances and simplifies the user experience. The toolset includes: Parallels Tools, a set of helpful add-ons that make working with virtual servers easier and more productive: Parallels Transporter, a built-in, wizard driven migration tool that can move the entire contents of a real machine to a virtual machine: and an integrated, single-click backup utility. Tools like this will be important to help further adoption of the platform. Virtual Support for 4-way Symmetric Multi-processing (SMP), which lets users assign up to 4 virtual cores to a virtual machine for exceptional performance under heavy workloads. Long ago seems the day when we only had support for a single virtual processor in a virtual machine. Experimental Support for Intel VT-d, enabling users to leverage full hardware-acceleration technologies for faster, more stable virtual machines and better resource management. Using VT-d, users can also directly assign hardware resources such as graphics and network cards to virtual machines, giving them native access to that hardware for optimal service levels. Parallels Server supports an impressive list of 50 different x86 and x64 guest operating systems, including Windows Server 2008. Many people are interested in virtualizing Mac OS X. Right now, because of license limitations, Leopard Server is the only version currently supported. Although Rudolph said that the feature is currently disabled in this Beta build. Hopefully, support for this operating system will get added back in soon.A full list of features and specifications are available on Parallels’ Web site, and you can now download the Beta 2 build of this server virtualization platform as well. Go here to find out more details and to download the product. Software Development