After no less than 2 years, Parallels finally updates its hosted virtualization platform for Windows and Linux.
Formerly known as Parallels Workstation, the product is now called Desktop for Windows & Linux and jumps from version 2.2 to 4.0.
The amount of new features introduced is remarkable and of course come from the Desktop for Mac product where Parallels focused most of its R&D effort in the last years.
Here’s a list of the most significant improvements:
- Support for 64bit host and guest operating systems
- Support for up to 8-way SMP
- Support for up to 8GB vRAM per virtual machine
- Support for Intel EPT nested page tables technology
- Support for Intel FlexPriority CPU migration technology
- Support for up to 2TB virtual hard disks
- Support for up to 16 vNICs
- Support for PXE network boot and port forwarding
- Seamless application publishing (Coherence) (for Windows guest OSes only)
- Snapshots and undo disks
- Virtual machines templates
- P2V migration tool (Transporter)
- Virtual machines image compression (Compressor)
- Command line interface (CLI)
- SDK
With this release Parallels finally demonstrates that it still cares something that is not the Apple market.
Hopefully we’ll not have to wait another two years before the next major release.