After announcing the beginning of private beta phase, SWsoft (soon to be renamed Parallels) finally unveils a detailed feature list for its upcoming Server product:
- Dual architecture (hosted virtualization platform / hypervisor)
- Support for x86 and x64 architectures (only with Intel VT-x)
- Support for up to 64Gb of RAM at host level
- Support for Mac OS X Server as host and guest OS
- Support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux and Sun Solaris as guest OSes
- Support for 4-way virtual SMP
- Support for ACPI at guest level
- Experimental support for Intel VT-d
- Open APIs
- Remote management console
Despite the obvious interest in Mac OS X Server virtualization, a first in the virtualization industry, the most compelling capability is the dual architecture: Parallels Server will act as a hosted virtualization platform (like VMware Server or Microsoft Virtual Server) or as hypervisor (like VMware ESX Server or Citrix XenServer) depending on which configuration the customer choose.
So far the company didn’t provide much details about this unique characteristic so that virtualization.info reported the inability of Parallels Server to run a hypervisor. As soon as possible we’ll provide a deep analysis of the platform internals.
Even if the current beta is private SWsoft is now accepting new candidates for the program. Enroll it here.