At the beginning of 2006 Parallels (at that time called SWsoft) announced the upcoming availability of its first hypervisor: Server.
The company planned to release the product in mid-2006 but after two years and a half it has yet to happen.
To be fair, in June 2008 Parallels released a server product called Server which doesn’t feature a full bare-metal architecture comparable with other hypervisors like VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V.
Despite the early marketing literature (now corrected), the current Parallels Server has a hybrid architecture that makes it more similar to a hosted product like VMware Server or Microsoft Virtual Server, and in fact it needs to be installed on Apple Mac OS Server.
Nonetheless the company didn’t change its plans: the hypervisor is still under development and will appear for the first time at the ongoing Summit 2009, held in Las Vegas.
One of the sessions presented later today in fact is titled Parallels Virtualization Roadmap Update and has a promising abstract:
This session covers the virtualization line products achievements and plans. It will present an overview of Parallels Server Bare Metal (the first product to combine hypervisor and OS virtualization technologies) and the next version of Parallels Virtuozzo Containers. A live demo of Parallels Server Bare Metal will be featured as well.
On top of its hypervisor, Parallels will also preview its new orchestration product, Virtual Automation, in a dedicated session:
This session cover key capabilities and benefits of using Parallels Virtual Automation to automate management of heterogeneous virtualized infrastructure. It also covers product roadmap as well as long-term strategy of Parallels Automation product line evolution. Furthermore, this session will provide online demo of upcoming release of Parallels Virtual Automation 4.5 with transparent support of hypervisor-based and OS-level virtualization technologies.