After EMC (which has just acquired VMware) and Microsoft (which acquired Connectix) a new player is trying to take its place: I’m talkin’ about the german NetSys GmbH, which sells a new product developed by russian Parallels Ltd called twoOStwo (with an under costruction official site and an unofficial one).
Actual operating systems supported as guest are OS/2 v3, OS/2 v4, OS/2 v4.5, DOS, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows NT/2000/XP, Linux (kernels 2.2 and 2.4) and FreeBSD while host can be a Windows OS, Linux (still in beta), FreeBSD (not released at all….I’d love to see a virtualization product for FreeBSD…) and for Citrix Metaframe (???).
At today the page about virtualization technology used by twoOStwo is under development but the unofficial site offers other interesting features like a competitors presentation and a comparison testing between twoOStwo, VMware Workstation and two Virtual PC editions (one from Connectix and one from Microsoft). It’s a pity comparison is conducted using OS/2 Warp 4 as guest instead of Microsoft Windows.
Virtualized hardware offered by twoOStwo seems absolutely standard (Vesa 3.0 video card, NE2000/NE2000+ network card) and this is really good for OS and applications compatibility. I’ll study deeper this product next days so stay tuned for news about it.