Desktop virtualisation come cloud enablement software house Parallels has come out with its first bare metal hypervisor, which it says has been designed and optimised for use by public cloud service providers.
Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov told us the company currently supports more than 50,000 service providers and these have specific requirements when it comes to their virtualised cloud-based production environments.
“Public cloud service operators of hosting companies, managed service providers, SaaS suppliers and telcos have some very different requirements from private or platform cloud infrastructure in terms of server density, the security, and the level of automated management that is required,” he said.
The availability of Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal should enable a range of use scenarios, from development and testing in the cloud to consolidating multiple operating systems on a single server.
Beloussov explained that one technology that is used prevalently in public cloud service scenarios is virtualisation with Parallels existing Virtuozzo Containers technology. This is used to run a single virtualised operating systems in multiple virtual instances on a single server. “This approach provides high performance, provides a high number of partitions and high server density.”
The new hypervisor software will now also allow administrators to run multiple virtual machines with a separate operating system in each on a single box.
Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal is truly heterogenous and fully supports features like live migration and comes with a variety of management tools, he said.
In a private cloud a systems administrator might typically be care-taking no more than 30 to 100 users, but in a public cloud the ratio of admin to end-user may be one to several tens of thousands, so automation support is very important, he explained.
“Our bare metal hypervisor is built with a stripped down Linux kernel and therefore supports a wide variety of hosts, and is fully unified with the container product line, he said.
It will cost around $5 per virtual machine per month with all tools included, or as a perpetual licence will retail at $999 per server.
The company said the combined offer features full life-cycle service delivery management for virtualised services including provisioning, upgrades, monitoring, backup, customer self-service, and other components.
Beloussov said Parallels now has around 700 staff and is profitable. He claimed that as many as 2 million desktops and 300,000 servers now run the company’s software, and that 70% of its business is with service providers who together have a reach of over 50 million.
