Parallels Virtualization Webcast

For those of you who couldn't attend this morning's webcast, I'm posting it below so you can view it when you have some time. Interesting stuff on both Hypervisor and Container virtualization technology and where each fits into the market:

get the flash player to see this player.

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Parallels "other" server product - Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.0 goes live...and join us for the webcast

Yesterday we launched Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.0, Parallels "other" server virtualization product. Chances are that many of you haven't heard of it, but its very cool technology that's unique in the industry. Here's what I mean:

In a hypervisor solution (like Parallels Server), server workloads are run in virtual servers that look and feel just like real servers. You build a VS, install an OS inside, and then install apps on top of the OS. Simple, and great for consolidating legacy OSes and hardware.

Parallels Virtuozzo Containers is different because is virtualizes the OPERATING SYSTEM, not the hardware. This means that you can install an OS (Windows or Linux) and then run workloads off that single kernel in isolated execution environments that we call "containers". Because all of the containers are working in direct contact with real hardware and are all working off that 1 OS install, performance is exceptional...about 97-99% of native, regardless of how many containers are running. And, container footprints are tiny - only 10MB of RAM and 45MB of disk space required at the bare minimum.

All of this means that you get the best performance and best density of any product in the market, meaning that Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.0 is the ideal solution for large scale, datacenter virutalization. And, as promised, we're working on integrating this product with Parallels Server, so eventually you'll be able to manage both from a single tool (called the Parallels Infrastructure Manager) and migrate between solutions.

Want more information on all of this? Join our CEO and leading industry experts from Intel, AMD, Novell, and more at our Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.0 Launch Keynote this Thursday at 11am ET. Just hit the site at that time and you'll be good to go!

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Walt Mossberg on Parallels Desktop & the MacBook Air

Walt Mossberg tested out the Macbook Air this week, and came to pretty much the same conclusion I did, which is that its an engineering marvel, but that it lacks enough key features (ethernet, optical drive, firewire, etc.) that its not the right computer for everyone.

As part of the review, Walt tested out Parallels Desktop with Windows XP. In typically to-the-point Walt style, he said: "I was able to install and run Windows XP using the third-party Parallels software."

Good enough for me, considering that I don't even HAVE the Air that I ordered for my lab yet!

You can read Walt's entire review at his "All Things D" site, as well as the "Mossberg's Mailbox" column where he recommends Parallels Transporter as a great way to migrate from an old PC to a VM running on a Mac.

Speaking of All Things D, I highly recommend it for those of you who are tech junkies like me. There are articles from a number of well known authors, as well as product reviews and general commentary on what's going on in tech.
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Microsoft Changes Its Mind on Vista Virtualization (again)

We got a welcome bit of news yesterday...Microsoft has changed its mind and is now allowing ALL flavors of Vista, including Home Basic and Home Premium, to run in a virtual machine. This means a lot of things at a lot of levels:

What it means for Microsoft:
It’s great to see that Microsoft is listening to its customers and is taking steps to increase the pace of virtualization adoption. This move shows that Microsoft is committed to the
virtualization market, and we think that this opens new opportunities for us to partner.

From a market share perspective, this is a strong move for Microsoft, as it puts Windows into the 6% of the market that would normally never be a Windows customer. This is a great way for Microsoft to effectively reach 100% of the desktop market.

What it means for IT guys:
This move is a good thing for current Microsoft customers, since it gives
them more deployment and testing flexibility since they now have easy access
to all versions of Vista. This is particularly important to IT admins, many of whom have been reluctant to move to Vista because of incompatibility or stability fears. By running Vista in a virtual machine, IT admins can easily test hardware, software, network settings, etc., without having to sacrifice a real machine, meaning they can effectively test configurations before deploying them to live, production machines. It also opens the opportunity to run Windows Vista and XP side-by-side, giving Windows shops the best of both worlds.

What it means for non-Windows shops:
It’s also a very good thing for Mac and Linux users, since they now have a cost effective
way to access Windows Vista and its massive software library. It makes it even easier for Mac and Linux users to integrate with a Windows-centric office.

I should also note that your current builds of Parallels Desktop and Parallels Workstation are ready to roll with Vista (all versions), so crack open that Vista box and get to work!
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New RED Parallels Wallpaper

Those of you who attended MacWorld last week probably noticed that we went red, and showed off our new logo and branding. Overall the response was really positive, and I got more than one request for the cool wallpaper we were showing off on all of our demo machines.

So, here it is...the new Parallels wallpaper. Throw it on your desktop and make the switch from Team Orange to Big Red!


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MacWorld wrap-up: Lots of good, a wee bit of bad

Whew! What a week at Macworld! It would take me hours to cover everything that happened last week in San Francisco, so I'll just hit the highlights (and lowlights).

The Good Stuff:
Parallels Server wins MacWorld Expo "Best of Show"
Even though it only debuted in beta a week ago, the editor's of MacWorld magazine found Parallels Server worthy enough to win "Best of Show". This is a huge honor; out of 500+ vendors and more than 1000 products on the show floor, Parallels Server was 1 of 10 to win this award. This is a great follow-up to last year's show, where Parallels Desktop 3.0 won "Best of Show". You can read about Parallels Server's win, and the other winners, here.

Parallels Desktop wins the MacWorld Magazine "Reader's Choice" Award for the second straight year
Last year, Parallels Desktop 3.0 was the first non-Apple product to win the Reader's Choice award. This year, we went-back to back by beating out some very impressive competition to win "Best Third Party Application". Great to see that our users are still behind us, and still really vocal in their support of what we're doing.

56 media briefings!
For those of you keeping score at home, that means that I did 11 briefings a day (12 on Tuesday) for 5 straight days. Exhausting? You betcha. Worth it? Absolutely! It was incredible to see industry pros from all over the world get so excited over Server and to get their expert insight into where they see the product fitting, what they'd like to see it do, and how to best get it out to the community. Thanks to everyone from the press who stopped by, and my apologies for losing my voice midway through day 2.

Thousands of happy users coming by the booth to say hello
When I say thousands, I mean thousands; the booth was literally stacked 5 deep for the entire show. It's always cool to talk with our users about how they're using our products and get their thoughts on what we should be doing next. Good thing we got the big 20' x40' booth space again next year!

Time Capsule
A 1TB wireless NAS for $499 that works plug-and-play with my Macs? Sign me up.


The Not-So-Good Stuff:
Devo
On Tuesday night, Microsoft's Office:Mac team hosted the annual MacWorld Blast, which is the big party at MacWorld. You have to have a ticket to get in, and this year, your ticket got you a chance to see Devo. Remember them? The band from the 80's? Funny hats and jumpsuits? Whip It? Yeah, you remember.

Now take those same guys, give them potbellies, grey hair, volleyball kneepads and stocking garters (yes, this is what they actually wore on stage), and have them to belt out cacophonous semi-nihilistic noise for an hour. Kind of disappointing after last year, where Cheap Trick played and put on a heck of show.

MacBook Air
I know that I'll get skewered for this, but I'm just not that impressed by the MacBook Air. Sure, its super thin and its a marvel of engineering...but its just not that usable to me. 1 USB port, no firewire, no ethernet jack, no optical drive....how can this be one's primary machine? And at $1800 for a baseline model (over $3000 for the "good one") it makes for a very, very expensive travel machine. I'll stick with my Santa Rosa MacBook Pro, thank you.

If you were at the show, what were your highlights/lowlights? Post a comment and let me know.

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Parallels will be at MacWorld next week...will you?

I know that many of you are attending MacWorld next week in San Francisco, and of course, we are too. Here's what you need to know to see the latest and greatest from Parallels:

Where's the booth?
We're at booth #902 in the South Hall. Come in the main doors and hang a left, and we're right up front.

What do I get to see if I come by?
We'll be showing off Desktop for Mac (of course), as well as demoing the all-new Parallels Server beta.

We're also hosting a number of daily "Daily Learning" sessions at the booth on a number of topics, like:

• Top 10 Reasons to Choose Parallels Desktop

• Using the Coherence View Mode

• Management & Maintenance Tools in Parallels Desktop

• Migrating a Windows PC to a Parallels Desktop Virtual Machine

• Partner Spotlight: Overview of Kaspersky Internet Security 7.0. Presented by Kaspersky

• Partner Spotlight: Deploying & Managing Parallels Desktop Using Casper Suite. Presented by JAMF

Any technical sessions going on?
Myself and Jesse Stanley, Sr. Sales Engineer, will be running a session called ‘Apple Server Virtualization 101 - Managing Virtual Systems on Mac OS X’ on Friday, January 18th starting at 10:45AM in the MacIT Conference track. Details are below:

Session: Apple Server Virtualization 101 - Managing Virtual Systems on Mac OS X (Code # IT862)
Date: Friday, Jan. 18th at 10:45am - 12:15pm
Track: Leveraging Apple Products for Enterprise Solutions
Conference: Mac IT Conference
Speakers: Benjamin Rudolph, Dir. of Corporate Communications
Jesse Stanley, Sr. Sales Engineer

I heard rumors of a party?
You heard right! We're having a pre-Blast party on Tuesday afternoon. But...its a relatively small venue and we have a lot of people coming, so if you'd like to attend you'll need a ticket. How do you get one? Come by the booth and give anyone on the Parallels Team the correct answer to this question:

Parallels has engineers working in which two Russian cities?

The first 20 people to answer the question correctly get a pass to the party.

Anything else?
We're in black shirts this year, not orange, so we'll be a bit more incognito than last year. However, I am still 6'1" and 230 lbs and will have a freshly shaved head, so I'm still easy to spot.

I'll see you next week at the show!

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Parallels Server Open beta launches today...with LEOPARD SERVER VIRTUAL MACHINES and more

This morning we kicked off open registration to join the Parallels Server Beta program, meaning that anyone can toss their proverbial hat into the ring and help us get the product ready for shipping. Just like with our Desktop and Workstation products, we need your help to tell us what you like and what you don't, what you want to see, and what you want us to do better.

Now on to the product. Parallels Server is packed with lots of great stuff, like:

• The ability to run more than 50 different x86 and x64 guest operating systems on any, Windows, Linux and Mac OS X Server. That's right, this isn't just a Mac product; its ready to go on just about any server, PC or Mac.

NOTE: Screenshots for this blog post were taken on my test iMac, since our Windows and Linux machines are in use by QA and support. I'll upload another post with some PC server screenshots as soon as I can get my hands on the boxes.

• The option to run virtual machines either in lightweight hypervisor mode (similar in implementation to Desktop for Mac) or in the headless mode via a “bare metal” hypervisor. This second option is particularly interesting as it enables VMs to run in parallel (pun intended) without being dependent on a primary operating system

• The ability to - for the first time EVER - run Mac OS X Leopard Server in a virtual machine! Yes, you heard right; if you're a Mac user, you will be able to run Leopard Server in its own VM. Great for testing and development, but also important for Mac Server admins who want to maximize their Xserve hardware.

And, to answer those of you who are asking the "Whoa, I can virtualize Leopard? Does that mean I can run OS X on a Dell/HP/IBM?", there are a few limitations:

1. This is for Leopard SERVER only, not Leopard Client.
2. This is only permitted on real Apple hardware, per Apple's EULA. You're still not allowed to run OS X on non-Apple hardware.
   

Behold, Leopard Server in a VM!
Equally important is that I have 4 VM's running, including 1 x64 VM and 1 2-way SMP VM, and CPU utilization is under a third.

• Remote control of the virtual machines via the Parallels Management Console. This means that you can manage multiple servers from anywhere you have an internet connection. Great for people like me who are on the road a lot, or for IT admins who won't want to have to head into the office at 5am because there's a problem.
  

• Support for up to 64Gb of RAM on the host computer.

• Full support for x64 primary and guest OSes, as well as 2-way SMP in virtual machines. The final release version will support up to 4-way SMP. This should make a lot of you techies happy. And yes, we'll be rolling this functionality into Desktop and Workstation soon too.

Windows 2003 Server x86 Edition running with 2-way SMP.

Windows 2003 Server x64 edition running with Mac OS X

• Multi-user access to the same virtual machine

• Support for ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) in virtual machines.
  

• Completely open, fully scriptable APIs for customized management. Customize your interface and write scripts to automate server tasks, like reboots, startups/shutdowns, etc. Work with the rest of the Parallels community to build your own suite of customized scripts!
  

• Full support for Intel VT-x, and experimental support for Intel VT-d. VT-d (short for Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O) is the second generation of Intel Virtualization Technology (for those of you running Desktop, your Mac has VT-x inside it already). VT-d not only boosts stability and performance, but also enables you to directly assign hardware resources like NICs and graphics cards to a VM. Pretty sharp stuff that's being rolled out now...yesterday's newly announced Mac Pros and Xserves have VT-d chips in them.

Look for more info on Parallels Server coming out over the next few weeks and months, and for regular beta updates.

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And another one...

Parallels Desktop was also named one of Amazon.com's "Best of 2007". This award was handed out by the software editors & reviewers at Amazon.com, who check out literally thousands of products every year.

Browse the whole list here.

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Parallels Desktop named InfoWorld's 2008 "Technology of the Year"

Today we received a huge honor; InfoWorld, one of the world's leading enterprise IT publications, named Parallels Desktop 3.0 on of their 2008 "Technologies of the Year"!

We were one of seven honorees in the "Platforms" group, along with Mac OS X Leopard, Sun Solaris 10, and more. You can read all about Parallels and the other winners here.

This win came out of a great article by Phil Windley about the merits of running Windows on a Mac, and which solution is best for the job. Read the entire article here; its very in depth and covers features, performance, and usability.

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