Macgasm

Parallels, the makers of the popular desktop virtualization software, has introduced a new server product; Parallels Server 4.0 Bare Metal Edition.

In case you’re not aware, most virtualization solutions require an operating system to already be in place before you can actually virtualize another guest operating system. The Mac’s virtualization options include Parallels Desktop 5, VMware Fusion 3, and Sun’s Virtualbox. Each of these requires you to have a copy of Mac OS X already running and installed.

This setup means that your base operating system will require at least a gigabyte of RAM just for it to run. This does not include the additional memory needed for the guest operating systems. On a Mac, you can only virtualize Windows or Linux operating systems. If you want to virtualize OS X, it must be Mac OS X Server.

The Bare Metal hypervisor removes a layer. Instead of needing an existing operating system you install the Parallels Bare Metal hypervisor as the very slimmed down operating system, and then install your virtual machines on top of that.

The idea of using a hypervisor is not new to the Windows and Linux world, but this is a new concept on the Mac Side. Windows has had products like Citrix Xen Server, VMWare’s ESX line, and Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

According to the Parallels brochure, this can be deployed on any Apple with VT-x support and is an Xserve or Mac Pro.

Some of the features include: Live Migration (I’m assuming between two Xserves running Bare Metal Edition), Full and Incremental backups, Migration from Physical to Virtual, Physical to Cloud, and Cloud to Virtual servers.

The Guest operating systems include Mac OS X, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, Windows Server 2000, 2003, and 2008, Red Hat Enterprise 4 and 5, CentOS 4 and 5, SUSE Enterprise Server 10, Debian Linux 4 or 5,, Ubuntu 8.10, 9.04, FreeBSD 6 and 7.

This is a definite plus for those Mac only shops who wish to be able to run windows virtual machines with some backup capabilities as well as snapshots. The pricing has yet to be announced, but the current cost for the Parallels Server is $1250 per server; but the PC version of the Bare Metal Server is only $999. If you are interested in the trial, you can obtain a copy along with all of the documentation from parallels.com.