At virtualization.info we usually don’t cover when a hosting provider adopts one virtualization or cloud platform rather than another, but of course there are a few exceptions.
Today we have one, with the announcement of Softlayer offering Parallels Server 4.5 Bare Metal as part of its virtualization portfolio.
The hosting provider already offers Virtuozzo Containers, the Parallels OS virtualization technology, since some time.
Parallels launched its hypervisor in October 2009 after several delays. So far the company didn’t spend much effort in promoting it and just a few customers are really aware that it’s an alternative to Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle VM Server and VMware ESX/ESXi.
The fact that Parallels Server Bare Metal is the only product in its category that doesn’t offer a free version doesn’t help much.
As far as virtualization.info knows, Softlayer is the very first provider to offer virtual machines powered by they Parallels hypervisor. Feedbacks about their performance compared to Xen and ESX based virtual infrastructures will be welcome.