DataCore Software Corporation joined Parallels in sponsoring their 4th annual Summit at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas.
We’re here talking about Virtualization centered on Parallels Virtuozzo Containers and their beta bare-metal hypervisor. Parallels has come a long way in the last couple of years to challenge the status quo as put forth in the virtualization industry from vendors like Citrix, Microsoft and VMware. While Parallels Virtuozzo Containers buck some of the traditional thinking in how server and desktop (VDI) virtualization should work.
If you are not familiar with how PVC (Parallels Virtuozzo Containers) works in essence it is a hybrid form of hosted virtualization verses bare-metal virtualization. It is a hybrid inasmuch as in traditional hosted virtualization you install a base OS and the hypervisor runs on top of the base OS. In PVC, the containers share the kernel and optionally application binaries from the host OS.
While this is significantly different philosophically from how CMV (Citrix, Microsoft and VMware) think virtualization should be approached. I’m not going to discuss the merits of either school of thought in this post, but suffice it to say Parallels strategy is worth considering for several reasons.
All this said, what is DataCore Software doing at Parallels Summit? DataCore Software and Parallels have been business and technology partners for some time but besides supporting an Alliance Partner, storage is one of, if not the key to virtualization. What is the big deal about storage; the bottom line is everything virtual or not has to be stored on disk. When it comes to storage, DataCore Software wrote the book on three key technologies: Thin-Provisioning, Caching and High-Availability. How these technologies affect virtualization is often not understood until after problems or constraints have occurred.
