Hi, I am RK Hiremane from Intel and I am responsible for product marketing of virtualization technology on Intel server and workstation platforms. I wish to begin this guest blog by congratulating Parallels, for delivering Parallels Workstation 4.0 Extreme, yet another unique software solution first to market that delivers significant value to all workstation customers. Let me explain the solution, our collaboration and the value to the end user in a bit more detail.
Some workstation users need multiple OS environments to perform their task. This is mostly due to their preference of applications and the OS environments these applications are optimized for. One such example in the Oil and Gas sector is GeoFrame, which runs on Linux, while Petrel runs on Windows, and engineers typically need both. These users also have large data sets in legacy environments, and hence porting of data and applications to single OS environment is challenging, time consuming and expensive.
Customer strategy to address multi-OS environment is to have multiple workstations, which results in more manageability and infrastructure (network, KVM, cabling) costs, and ergonomic issues at the worker’s desk. In some cases a single workstation with multi-boot options are used, which results in productivity loss switching back and forth.
Virtualization is a compelling solution to the challenge as it provides the ability to run multiple OSes on a single platform. However, since devices are emulated by most hypervisors/VMMs, graphics performance was not there. Most workstation users in manufacturing, oil and gas, finance, engineering, or content creation depend heavily on visualization. None of these users really want to sacrifice graphics performance, so we had to get around the emulation of graphics device in the VMM.
This is where the collaboration between Intel and Parallels began. We felt confident that Parallels with their graphics experience in virtualization would be capable of delivering a workstation solution that addressed the challenge. Intel’s VT for Directed I/O technology (VT-d) in the chipset allowed Parallels to enable the Virtual Machine (VM) or Guest OS directly access the graphics card without going through the VMM and thereby avoid the sluggish performance associated with emulation of graphics card in the VMM.
Once the VMM assigns each graphics card directly to a VM independently, the graphics card is in full control of the guest OS running in the VM. The guest OS driver and any associated accelerators (OpenGL or DirectX) can be used with graphics device assigned directly. This lets end users to experience the full graphics capability including full 3D capability and near native performance even in virtualized environment on a workstation.
Similarly network devices can also be directly assigned for I/O performance.
The applicability of Parallels Workstation Extreme is broad and many. It enables end users for the first time to run graphics intensive visualization and compute intensive tasks on multiple OSes on a single workstation. End users can also deploy their corporate sensitive applications on one VM and secure it from other business productivity applications on another VM. Developers can test visualization applications on multiple OS at the same time.
Give Parallels Workstation Extreme on Intel’s newest Xeon 5500 based Workstations from HP a try and tell us how it benefits you.
RK Hiremane is a product marketing manager at Intel responsible for virtualization technology marketing on Intel server and workstation products. He has been with Intel for 10 years, holds two patents and has published several articles. He has an MBA in business strategy and MS in electrical engineering, and enjoys hiking, climbing and snowboarding.
Ray Chew
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