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Paralells and Quest Software Sign Exclusive Deal

Tuesday, 24 June 2008 by Michel Roth

Today, Quest Software and Parallels officially announced that they have entered an exclusive partner agreement facilitating a combined offering consisting of Quest Software Provision Networks division Virtual Access Suite and Parallels Virtuozzo Containers. With this announcement Parallels is very clearly setting foot into the VDI market. The exclusive agreement allows Parallels and Quest Software to offer a special bundle of (Quests Software's) Virtual Access Suite and Parallels Virtuozzo Containers at $140 (srp) per concurrent desktop connection.

As is known in our community, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers has an interesting approach to virtualization. I think it is best described as OS virtualization. This approach allows for greater density of workloads when compared to other Hypervisor solutions. Three times greater density are numbers that are used. Another thing to know is that since Parallels Virtuozzo Containers runs on Windows Server 2003 as a result all "containers" are also Windows Server 2003.To me this conceptually puts it somewhere in the middle of Terminal Services and VDI.

Parallels also has some other really neat features like Application Templating (a poor man's application virtualization) and the ability to hot add storage to a container for example. Another advantage to using Parallels Virtuozzo Containers is that the storage requirement is much less than in a traditional VDI environment.

I'm pretty sure there are also some disadvantages (like the fact that desktop operating systems are not supported) but I am no expert. In any case, I'm sure that there are some very interesting usage scenarios for this technology, not to mention economically more feasible scenarios.

Read the press release for more information.