Quoting from the Parallels official announcement email:
Following the successful release of Parallels Workstation 2.0, the world’s first hypervisor powered desktop virtualization solution, Parallels Inc., today announced the availability of Parallels Workstation 2.1 beta. The new version of Parallels’ powerful, user-friendly, cost-effective desktop virtualization solution boasts a number of important improvements, including:
- Stronger virtual machine performance, stability and isolation
- USB support enables users to access a wide range of popular USB devices directly in virtual machines
- “Suspend and Resume” functionality that lets users instantly suspend a virtual machine’s state and resume it at a later time without having to completely shut down and start up a guest operating system
- Support for Physical Address Extension (PAE) allows Workstation 2.1 to run on PAE-enabled primary OSes with up to 4GB of RAM
- Wireless networking support in Windows frees users from network cables. Now, users can connect virtual machines to the internet via any WiFi connection
- Stronger support for Intel VT technology and a more complex virtual processor significantly improve performance of a wide range of applications running in virtual machines
- An improved, redesigned Parallels Tools package for Windows that provides useful add-on features that let each user customize their Parallels Workstation experience. New tools include guest/host time synchronization and complete support for normal video modes in Windows 95, 98 and Me
- Primary and guest OS support for SuSE Linux 10, and guest OS support for Sun Solaris
Apply for the beta program here.