Virtualization Market Heats Up

Parallels and VMLogix are each rolling out new virtualization products Jan. 28 intended to help customers manage their increasingly virtualized data centers.

One of the more significant improvements in the new version of Parallels' Virtuozzo is the management console—Parallels Infrastructure Manager —which, along with a redesigned interface, should make the virtual environment easier to manage and control.

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With virtualization becoming a more acceptable technology in the data center, vendors such as Parallels and VMware are offering improved management software to help control sprawling virtual environments.

“With the release of Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.0, we are launching the next wave of virtualization, including a suite of products that help IT managers effectively manage their growing virtual infrastructures,” Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov said in a statement.

Parallels is also adding high-availability features to its Virtuozzo suite to work with a number of operating systems, including Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat clustering services; real-time backups for both Linux and Windows platforms; and improved network management and VLAN (virtual LAN ).

The Virtuozzo software partitions Linux and Microsoft operating systems in virtual containers or environments. This is a different approach to virtualization than the way VMware and other x86 virtualization vendors use hypervisor technology to partition a physical server into multiple virtual environments.

Parallels, which dropped its SWsoft name at the beginning of the year, is making the 4.0 version of its Virtuozzo Containers virtualization product generally available for $2,500 per dual CPU.