Parallels brings bare-metal virtualization to Apple's Xserve hardware
New bare-metal hypervisor allows Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux virtual servers to operate side-by-side on Mac server hardware
Follow @infoworldParallels, known for its cloud services automation and virtualization software, unveiled its latest virtualization solution for Apple hardware: Parallels Server for Mac Bare Metal Edition. The announcement came during the company's Parallels Summit '10 conference, which took place in Miami last week.
Parallels is certainly no stranger to Mac users or Mac hardware. Back in 2006 when the Intel processing platform was introduced to the Mac line, Parallels developed and introduced Parallels Desktop for Mac. The next innovation came in June of 2008 when the company launched Parallels Server for Mac, creating the first hosted server virtualization solution for Intel-powered Apple systems. Now, taking things one step further with this latest announcement, Parallels is bringing a true bare-metal hypervisor offering to Apple hardware.
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With the previous hosted version of Parallels Server for Mac, users could operate independent Mac OS X, Linux and Windows virtual machines on top of the same Mac OS X powered Xserve host server. But introduced with this latest product, those same virtual machines can now operate directly on top of the Xserve hardware itself without the need for a Mac OS X operating system installed. Thus, this hypervisor and its virtual machines run on bare-metal with nothing but Parallels installed.
The new bare-metal virtualization technology promises to provide an additional performance boost with less overhead. It also adds other key features such as live migration (the ability to move virtual environments between physical host servers without the need for going offline), built-in backup solutions (offering incremental and full backups of virtual environments to protect data, applications, and configurations), virtual machine templates (to reduce setup and configuration time), virtual environment cloning and snapshots, physical-to-virtual migration utilities, and virtual networking (to include virtual environments in different networks).
