Parallels Workstation 4.0 Extreme

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.

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