From the corporate blog Benjamin Rudolph, Director of Corporate Communications at SWsoft, announces that the long awaited Parallels Server finally entered beta 1 stage.
SWsoft provided few informations about this product in the last few months, showing the first, very early Alpha at Apple WWDC 2007 conference last June, and publishing a short tentative features list:
- Enhanced virtual SMP (multi-core virtual machines)
- Binary and web-based management tools (with capability to manage physical and virtual machines at the same time)
- Open APIs
- Support for SWsoft management console (Virtuozzo and Parallels Server can be managed by the same tool)
The product was originally supposed to be a so called type-1 VMM (aka hypervisor), comparable with VMware ESX Server, Xen and upcoming Microsoft Hyper-V, but virtualization.info retrieved different informations at VMworld 2007 conference.
Another expected feature of Parallels Server is a Mac OS X 10.5 Server version, which raised high interest because of Apple recent changs to its licensing policy for virtualization environments.
Unfortunately this first phase is private so the large majority of users will have to wait for a second, public beta, before discovering the real feature-set and supported platforms.
Parallels Server will be a part of the new virtualization strategy unveiled last month by SWsoft, that will soon change name in Parallels.