Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal

Parallels has finally added a bare metal server hypervisor to its family of virtualisation products. Designed to compete with longer established tools from the likes of VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal is based on the firm’s tried-and-tested technology, but with a couple of unique twists thrown in to help it stand out from the crowd.

The new hypervisor follows the usual pattern of installation straight onto industry standard 64bit server hardware without the need for a separate host operating system.

Unlike most of the competition, however, Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal is not free. Parallels contends that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and that the overall cost is the same once you factor in the cost of the required management and migration tools that are included with its product.

Moreover, the enterprise versions are licensed per-server, with no restrictions on processors or sockets, making for a very cost-effective solution, especially in larger organisations.

Test found the Small Business Edition very easy to get up and running. All that was needed was to download a DVD image, burn it to disk, then use it to boot our test server. This was based on Intel’s dual-core Xeon processors, but AMD chips can be used. Whichever server processor technology you have, virtualisation support in the form of Intel VT-x or AMD-V is required for Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal.

A simple setup routine guided us through the installation (about 10 minutes), after which we were able to point a browser at the server and download the management console, versions of which are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Up to five servers can be managed using this console, with an optional web-based tool (Par allels Virtual Automation) for larger deployments. A separate migration utility to convert physical servers to Parallels’ virtual machine (VM) image format is also included.

From the Parallels Management Console we found it easy to create, edit and clone VMs, with support for up to 12 virtual processors and 64GB of RAM per VM.

You need sufficient physical resources to fully exploit these generous limits, of course, so it was good to also find tools to fine tune and balance loads more precisely. Processing power, for example, can be allocated in units of one thousandth of a CPU, with flexible virtual networking facilities another key feature.

There’s support too for USB devices - unusual on a server hypervisor - enabling us to connect printers and storage devices to our VMs. We also liked the ability to connect CD/DVD drives from either the host server or the management PC to each VM, or connect remote .iso images instead. These are options which make life a lot easier when it comes to installing an operating system and applications. The inclusion of a backup tool is another very welcome option.

In terms of guest support, it’s possible to run a variety of Windows and Linux operating systems, either 32bit or 64bit in each case. Acceleration tools for the Parallels hypervisor are provided for both platforms, and another nice feature is the ability to migrate VMs between servers without having to configure a cluster or shared storage area network. Instead, VMs can simply be moved from one server to another over the local area network with a variety of options to minimise the amount of downtime involved.

A wizard helps manage migration, and we had few problems moving VMs from our main server to another over a simple TCP/IP network.

Unfortunately, the so-called Live Migration promised in the marketing isn’t fully delivered in this release. VMware, Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors all have this fully working, but Parallels admitted that that there would be disruption of service when migrating most applications in bare metal VMs.

On the plus side, support for clustering and failover of complete servers as well as VMs is another option, although it requires Red Hat Linux clustering software.

Another unique option is the inclusion of not just a hypervisor, but operating system-level virtualisation, as used in Parallels’ Virtuozzo Containers product. Here, instead of individual VMs each with its own separate operating system, you install one copy of an operating system then create a layer of ‘containers’ which are isolated instances of the same operating system.

Because there’s no extra operating system to install, containers are quicker to build than VMs and much easier to migrate, such that live container migration is a real option, even in this first release of Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal.

However, despite extensive instructions on how to manage containers in the manuals provided, support for this technology isn’t included in either the Small Business Edition we tested or the Standard Edition (£659 ex VAT per server) which, paradoxically, includes the web-based Virtual Automation tool that can be used to manage both VMs and containers.

Containers are popular with service providers, and support is only available in the Advanced Edition (£989 ex VAT per CPU) aimed at this market rather than enterprise customers. Moreover, containers are Linux only in this release.

Even without the containers option, however, the Parallels hypervisor has a lot to offer, proving to be easy to deploy, highly scalable, and in our tests capable of delivering performance levels on a par with the competition.

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Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal

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