After the launch of its first Parallels Server for Mac OS (a hosted virtualization solution), Parallels has been pretty silent, working hard to release its first bare-metal (aka hypervisor) virtualization platform.
The company stays mum on the launch date but its founder and CEO, Serguei Beloussov, gives a precious hint about the product potential in an interview with On-Demand Enterprise:
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The goal is to have the right technology for the job, he says, and toward that ideal Parallels is planning to combine the two approaches into one product. “You’ll be able to integrate containers or full hypervisor virtual machines on a server,” Beloussov says. This “integrated virtualization offering” is slated to be available next year…
If properly executed the idea is pretty good.
One day we may have three virtualization approaches (hardware, OS and application) nested all together on the same physical platform and, depending on the task required by the user, the best of them may be transparently selected and used to serve the proper workload.
It’s what we liked to call liquid computing in the last couple of years.
Maybe Parallels doesn’t have all the three virtualization layers, but if it can build a great orchestration framework and apply it to the layers it own today, the company may achieve the goal before its competitors with a similar opportunity: VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and Sun.