Parallels: Affordable virtualization to your desktop

Recently I've come across several articles that mentioned a software called Parallels Workstation as an option for running Windows on a Mac (Intel) computer. I caught my attention for I must say that the quality and design of Apple's computers attract me, but I've always resisted the desire to buy one, due to one or two Windows-only applications I need to use.

I have had a lot of contact with virtualization technology, over the last 8 months, since I'm adopting this technology at Webb for server consolidation, based on VMWare's ESX Server product, and I was curious to see what this new player was bringing to the Market.
I took the demo version of Parallels Workstation for a spin this weekend and setup two virtual machines in a couple of hours, with zero problems during installation. One of them running Windows XP Professional, and the other running Fedora Core 4 Linux. The only issue I seemed to have was that I could not get my Fedora to update from the Internet but I would credit that more to inaptitude as a Linux user than to a fault in the Parallels software. It is interesting to note that the latest VMWare software does not run Fedora Core 4 or 5, but Parallels seemed to have no problem whatsoever.

I've stared up the machines a few times and played around with them some and I have to admit that the performance is impressive. With the Parallels Tools installed in my Windows machine I can switch back and forth from applications in the virtual machine (VM) and my computer and even share clipboard content across from the real to/from the virtual computer. I'm actually writing this post in a instance of Firefox that is running inside the virtual machine. I'm running a vanilla installation of Windows XP Professional on a 384 MB virtual machine on a Dell Latitude 510 notebook with 1 GB of RAM and I perceive very little, if any, performance hit from running the basic applications from within he VM.

Parallels is competing aggressively against VMWare (EMC) and Microsoft's Virtual PC/Server products. It distinguishes it self for running on OSX and for having a much lower price tag on the Workstation product. For only $49.99 it offers great value for your money and I'm pretty much sold on the idea of using it as my personal VM solution.

The server version of the product is not yet available but from the little I've seen in the few hours I've used Parallels over the last two days I'm sure to keep an eye out for its release.