vmwarez.com
           -Where Virtualization is a Reality!

It seems that virtualization is really picking up steam. Every day more and more companies are getting on board in one way or another. A lot of die hard vmware fans may get a little testy when they see things like this, but I'm a big fan of compitition. Don't get me wrong... vmware is still the king, in my opinion.

Parallels (never heard of them before today, but that may just show you how little I used to pay attention) just released version 2.0 of their workstation product. Like its name might lead you to believe, it is a direct competitor to vmware workstation. I don't see a lot of features in it like you get for teams, fancy network stuff, cloning, etc, but I haven't demo'd it yet. I'll post about it again after I try it.

They brag about being the world's first virtual pc product that is hypervisor powered:

"Parallels Workstation 2.0 is the first desktop virtualization solution to
include a lightweight hypervisor, a mature technology originally developed in
the 1960s to maximize the power of large mainframes. Hypervisor technology
dramatically improves virtual machine stability, security and performance by
using a thin layer of software, inserted between the machine’s hardware and the
primary operating system, to directly control some of the host machine’s
hardware profiles and resources. It not only makes Parallels Workstation-powered
virtual machines secure, stable and efficient, but also empowers users to
immediately realize the benefits associated with Intel VT hardware
virtualization architecture."

Sounds good to me.... again, I'll write a follow-up post after trying it out.

Other features include:

Wide support for guest operating systems
Windows 3.1 through Windows 2003
Lots of Linux flavors including Red Hat SuSE, Mandriva, Debian, Fedora Core
dos, eComStation and get this: OS/2 :) those were the days...

Windows or Linux Hosts

Hardware virtualization optimized... full support for Intel VT and coming support for AMD's Pacifica

$49 per license !!! that's gotta hurt, however, that may just be a way to counter the free vmware player.