Contrary to what every news magazine reported (including virtualization.info) the upcoming server virtualization product called Parallels Server will not be a true bare-metal hypervisor (aka type-1 VMM).
virtualization.info met a Parallels engineer at past VMworld 2007 which confirmed that first edition of this product will be able to install on bare metal, but will not use an architecture comparable with one used in VMware ESX Server, Xen-based products or upcoming Microsoft codename Viridian.
virtualization.info received few details but it seems that when installed on bare-metal, Parallels will first deploy a custom Linux distribution with Parallels Server on top of it. So we are talking about a hosted VMM solution, nearer to VMware Server and Microsoft Virtual Server.
Parallels plans to move to a true hypervisor architecture in following versions of the product but didn’t disclose any specific timeframe.