It took some time to arrive but Parallels has entered new territory with the launch of its bare metal hypervisor. Parallels Server Bare Metal is aimed squarely at cloud computing providers enabling them to offer a range of new services to their customers.

Parallels Server Bare Metal, which has had a lengthy beta period, seamlessly integrates with the company's Virtual Automation product. The combination of the two products will offer life-cycle service delivery management for virtualised services including provisioning, upgrades, monitoring, backup, customer self-service, and other components.

"The main advantage for a cloud computing provider, said Parallels CEO,Serguei Beloussov is that it will be able to work with a common set of APIs to offer both the Parallels Container product as well as virtual machines."

Parallels Server Bare Metal supports a several operating systems and applications. The company said that it could be used for many different situations including test and development and elastic cloud computing. The product offers a scalable architecture that supports up to eight vCPUs, 64GB vRAM, 2TB vHDDs and 16 vNICs per virtual machine for intensive applications.

Beloussov said that the product could support an almost unlimited number of users. "We have customers who are running more than 50,000 virtual servers - it could probably go over 100.000 servers.

He said that Parallels would offer many advantages over VMware. "VMware is aimed particularly at enterprises but the parallel I would draw is I see VMware as offering a technology for a gated community while we're aiming ours at highly tenanted apartment buildings."