Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
I have been a big fan of VMware products for a very long time, since the release of VMware Workstation 1.0 actually. I run VMware workstation on Windows, on Linux, and as of recently VMware Fusion on my MacBook. I was telling a friend of mine about how much I like my new MacBook as I have traditionally been a PC guy for many many moons and he asked if I was running “Parallels” on it. I had no idea what he was talking about as I had never pain much attention to parallels before. Well if you have never heard of them or ever seen their desktop virtualization products I highly recommend that you do.
Here is a link to their Workstation 4.0 Extreme demonstration. Just click the demos button and watch the video. After watching this video I think I need to buy a few more monitors and some extra video cards because I have got to try this out.
Here is their list of features and I have to say it might just become my new favorite desktop hypervisor.
Run graphics-intensive workloads with optimal performance using dedicated system resources on a single workstation.
- Parallels FastLane Architecture — Utilize a turbo-charged hypervisor engine to support the latest hardware virtualization technologies.
- Direct I/O Access to Graphic & Network Cards — Take advantage of Intel VT-d technology on the Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series (Nehalem) and Tylesburg platform for full visualization and networking acceleration in a virtual environment. Supported hardware includes NVIDIA Quadro FX professional graphics card and gigabit networking cards.
- Parallels Tools with support for selected NVIDIA Quadro Graphics Cards — Extensive Windows and Linux integration support for fully-optimized VMs, including native device driver support for NVIDIA Quadro graphic cards.
- Adaptive Hypervisor — Load-balance CPU resources as you move between host and guest OS to optimize performance.
- Support for up to 16-way SMP — Assign up to 16 virtual CPUs in a VM for truly high-end computing.
- Large Memory Support — Assign up to 64GB of RAM in a VM.
- Supported Primary OSs — Growing list of supported primary OSs include Windows XP SP2 64-bit, Windows Vista SP1 64-bit and RHEL 5.3 64-bit.
- Supported Guest OSs — Growing list of supported guest OSs include Windows Vista SP1 64-bit, Windows XP SP2 64-bit, RHEL 4.7 and 5.3 64-bit and Fedora 10 64-bit.
- Supports Virtual Disk sizes up to 2TB.
- Up to 16 Virtual Network Adapters per VM.
What about stability?
I will let you know after I have tested it. I have 3 22″ screens to test it on, just need to get the video cards and see how it performs.
@Sid Smith
I read a few weeks ago that it will support DirectX10 because of direct access to the vidcard. After you get the vid cards could you test that out?
Yes this is suppose to be the case. I will be testing this, it’s one of the reasons I am interested in this product.