More virtualisation companies come out of the woodwork

Today's discovery is Parallels, Inc., who contacted us after our Guardian piece on Intel's processor roadmap. Looking at their web site, it appears that they're going straight for the hypervisor market:

Parallels Enterprise Server, expected in mid-2006, will be a pure-hardware server virtualization and management solution that enables IT professionals to create several isolated independent virtual servers running Windows, Linux, OS/2, or FreeBSD on a single host physical server. Parallels Enterprise Server’s pure hardware implementation pools hardware resources and then dynamically allocates them to virtual servers as necessary, ensuring that each physical server is used to its maximum potential, and that each virtual server always has the resources it needs to operate efficiently.

It sounds like Parallels' Enterprise Server will be something that will work straight with Intel's VT and/or AMD's Pacifica, removing the need for a host OS - and giving a fairly hefty saving on system resources. So who will have the first hypervisor on the market? Parallels? Xen? VMware? Microsoft? It's an interesting race that's lining up now - with plenty of competition and scope for differentiation and innovation.