Quoting from the Paralles official announcement:
After months of focused research, development and testing, Parallels, Inc., (www.parallels.com) today announced the immediate general availability of Parallels Workstation 2.0, the world’s first hypervisor-powered desktop virtualization solution, at the industry leading price point of $49 per license.
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Parallels Workstation 2.0’s lightweight hypervisor inserts a thin layer of software between the machine’s hardware and the primary operating system that directly controls some hardware profiles and resources, resulting in dramatically improved virtual machine stability, reliability, and performance. The technology also empowers Parallels Workstation to fully realize the features and benefits of Intel Virtualization Technology architecture, an important new technology that optimizes CPUs for virtualization…