Parallels announces Server for Mac 4.0

Last week Parallels announced the upcoming availability of its hosted server virtualization platform: Server for Mac 4.0

Parallels launched the first version of Server in June 2008. At that time virtualization.info wrongly reported the news saying that it was the bare-metal hypervisor that the company initially announced in 2005 and that appeared only in October 2009.
Parallels Server instead is a type-2 virtual machine monitor (VMM) that could compete with VMware Server, to be discontinued by June 2011, if VMware Server would be available for Mac OS X. But it’s not, so Parallels is basically the only player in this niche market.

virtualization.info couldn’t track any version of Parallels Server beyond 1.0, so this new build actually is the second release and not the fourth one.
It introduces a number of new features, including:

  • Resources (vCPUs, vRAM, vHDs and vNICs) metering and accounting
  • Virtual machines backup (full and incremental) and recovery
  • Physical to Virtual (P2V) and Virtual to Virtual (V2V) migration for Windows and Linux operating systems
  • Support for Mac OS X 10.6 Server as host operating system
  • Support for Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 guest operating systems
  • Support for Apple Xsan
  • Support for Parallels Virtual Automation 4.6
  • Support for virtual hard drives manipulation (resize and compact) via CLI

The product will be available starting July 2nd, with an entry price of $1,999 USD.