I was just reading Liam Eagle’s blogpost on SWSoft and Parallels. Apparently, Parallels, the developer of the Parallels Desktop — a hardware virtualization software on Windows, Linux and Mac — has actually been under a new management for three years. Who is the new owner? SWsoft, home of popular virtualization (Virtuozzo) and server automation (Plesk) software.

It is all good. “Diversify” has always been a golden rule in the business. When you are already holding a good chunk of the market share (Linux/Windows VPS hosting), why not side track a bit into another fast growing market (desktop virtualization)?

But what’s so funny?

According to the Virtuozzo blog, the next step for Parallels is their server products.

With Parallels server products coming soon, SWsoft now provides a full range of server virtualization products. SWsoft customers don.t have to make a hard choice between hardware and OS virtualization. They can have both, and from the same vendor.

Large scale server deployment has been Virtuozzo’s speciality, and now Parallels is coming to the very same market. It is actually not uncommon for a company to have two products competing in the same arena, and Virtuozzo’s blog post has certainly tried to excuse themselves, saying that they are in fact complementing instead of competing.

With that I fully agree. OS virtualization and hardware virtualization do have their own distinct features. However, while they are different, there still exists a big intersection between their targeted markets.

Moreover, the Virtuozzo blog has long been a critic of hardware/para-virtualization, where VMWare, Xen and Microsoft Virtual Server are frequently attacked. For example, this (VMWare taking over the role of OS, so Linux and Windows vendor should take up the fight with the alternate solution), or this (VMWare=slow, OS virtualization=fast), or this (para-virtualization is slow), or this (hardware/para-virtualization is re-inventing the wheel). I am not saying the attacks are miss-leading, and there are indeed a lot of truth in there! However, now with Parallels, another hardware virtualization software, on board, I wonder whether the tone of the Virtuozzo blog will be different.

Funny isn’t it? 4 months ago the hardware/para-virtualization technology is reinventing the wheel. Now they are just complimenting.