SWsoft is preparing to advance on a broad front in virtualisation with new desktop and server products that encroach on the territory dominated by VMware.
Due this month, the first release will be a free upgrade to the desktop
product it sells under the Parallels brand. The key new feature of the release
is a Coherence mode, which lets Windows applications run on a Mac without
displaying the Windows desktop or taskbar.
“Coherence means Windows apps look like Mac apps,” said SWsoft chief executive
Serguei Beloussov.
Other features include Transporter, a toolkit that helps users move entire
Windows PCs into Parallels virtual machines without reinstallation, as well as
USB 2.0 support.
SWsoft sees Parallels as a convenient way for multiple users to share home or
business systems.
“Today, computers all share the same operating system with the same applications, games and spyware,” said Beloussov. “[With Parallels] each one of you can have your own environment and not break anything [in another user’s setup].”
Later this year, SWsoft plans to challenge VMware with a server release of Parallels that, like its larger rival’s products, can run multiple operating systems on one box.
That capability, often referred to as hardware virtualisation, contrasts SWsoft’s best known product Virtuozzo, which can run multiple partitions of a single operating system, a technique usually called operating system virtualisation.
However, the firm does not plan a head-on challenge to VMware. “Even now, we
do not intend to compete with VMware but to complement it and go to parts of the
market where VMware is not present,” said Beloussov. “Small and medium-sized
businesses and departments of larger organisations have a very different set of
requirements.”
Beloussov added that he did not expect the server release of Parallels to
necessarily appeal to a more high-end audience than Virtuozzo.
“There are many environments you wouldn’t dream of putting on VMware, such as high-performance computing, application servers, service providers and multitenant applications,” he said.
In August, SWsoft announced that all future Virtuozzo releases would include tools for managing multiple virtualisation vendors’ software.
SWsoft is far smaller than VMware, itself a subsidiary of storage management giant EMC, but its growth rate is impressive. IDC figures suggest virtualisation revenues as a whole grew 67 percent in 2005 with SWsoft up 98 percent year on year.
Virtualisation is set to be the most interesting enterprise IT technology in 2007. Red Hat will build in virtualisation with its Enterprise Linux 5 release next month, following on from Novell’s inclusion last year of virtualisation capabilities with Suse Linux.
Microsoft also has big plans for virtualisation with a technology codenamed Viridian that complements the next Windows Server release, codenamed Longhorn. However, Longhorn is not due to be available until late 2007 and Microsoft has said that Viridian will lag a further six months behind.
However, VMware is already reacting to the threats to its market leadership. In its latest move, the firm earlier this month released a scaled-down version of VMware Server, designed to appeal to small and medium-sized enterprises.
