Parallels Workstation is the first commercial software product released by Parallels, Inc., a developer of desktop and server virtualization software. The Workstation software comprises a

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

suite for

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...

-compatible computers (running

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

) (for Mac version, see Parallels Desktop for Mac) which allows the simultaneous creation and execution of multiple x86 virtual computers. They distributed the product as a download package. Parallels Workstation has been discontinued for Windows and Linux as of 2013.

Implementation

Like other virtualization software, Parallels Workstation uses

hypervisor A hypervisor, also known as a virtual machine monitor (VMM) or virtualizer, is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called ...

technology, which is a thin software layer between Primary OS and host computer. The hypervisor directly controls some of the host machine's hardware resources and provides an interface to it for both virtual machine monitors and primary OS. This allows virtualization software to reduce overhead. Parallels Workstation's hypervisor also supports hardware virtualization technologies like Intel VT-x and

AMD-V x86 virtualization is the use of hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities on an x86/x86-64 CPU. In the late 1990s x86 virtualization was achieved by complex software techniques, necessary to compensate for the processor's lack of hardware- ...

Features

Parallels Workstation is a hardware emulation virtualization software, in which a virtual machine engine enables each virtual machine to work with its own processor, RAM, floppy drive, CD drive, I/O devices, and

hard disk A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...

– everything a physical computer contains. Parallels Workstation virtualizes all devices within the virtual environment, including the video adapter, network adapter, and hard disk adapters. It also provides pass-through drivers for parallel port and

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...

devices. Because all guest virtual machines use the same hardware drivers irrespective of the actual hardware on the host computer, virtual machine instances are highly portable between computers. For example, a running virtual machine can be stopped, copied to another physical computer, and restarted. Parallels Workstation can virtualize a full set of standard PC hardware, including: * A 64-bit processor with NX and AES-NI instructions. * A generic

motherboard A motherboard, also called a mainboard, a system board, a logic board, and informally a mobo (see #Nomenclature, "Nomenclature" section), is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expandable systems. It ho ...

compatible with

P965 chipset. * Up to 64 GB of RAM. * VGA and

SVGA Super VGA (SVGA) or Extended VGA is a broad term that covers a wide range of computer display standards that extended IBM's Video Graphics Array, VGA specification. When used as shorthand for a resolution, as VGA and XGA often are, SVGA refers to ...

video cards with

VESA VESA (), formally known as Video Electronics Standards Association, is an American standards organization, technical standards organization for computer display standards. The organization was incorporated in California in July 1989To retrieve ...

VBE 3.0 support and up to 256 MB of VRAM. * A 1.44 MB floppy drive, which can be mapped to a physical drive or to an image file. * Up to four IDE devices. This includes virtual hard drives that range in size from 20 MB to 128 GB each and CD/DVD-ROM drives. IDE devices can be mapped to physical drive or to an image file. * Up to 16

SATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard ...

devices including hard disks and CD/DVD drives. * Up to four

serial port A serial port is a serial communication Interface (computing), interface through which information transfers in or out sequentially one bit at a time. This is in contrast to a parallel port, which communicates multiple bits simultaneously in Pa ...

s that can be mapped to a real port, to a pipe or to an output file. * Up to three bi-directional parallel ports, each of which can be mapped to a real port, to a real printer or to an output file. * An

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

virtual network card compatible with Realtek RTL8029(AS) with full

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communication protocol, communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic ...

support. *

2.0 controller. * An

AC'97 AC'97 (''Audio Codec '97;'' also MC'97 for ''Modem Codec '97'') is an audio codec standard developed by Intel Architecture Labs and various codec manufacturers in 1997. The standard was used in motherboards, modems, and sound cards. The specif ...

compatible sound card. * A 104-key Windows enhanced keyboard and a PS/2 wheel mouse.

Officially supported guest operating systems

* Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP * Linux distributions: Debian 6.0, Fedora 14 & 15, OpenSuse 11.1, RHEL 6, SLED 11 SP1, Ubuntu 10.10, 11.04 and 11.10 * OS X

System requirements

The last version of Parallels Workstation (version 6) requires: * CPU: Minimum 1.66 GHz,

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit extension of the x86 instruction set architecture, instruction set. It was announced in 1999 and first available in the AMD Opteron family in 2003. It introduces two new ope ...

. To run 64-bit guest operating systems, a processor supporting the Intel VT-x hardware virtualization technology is recommended. * RAM: at least 2GB is required, but 4GB and above are recommended.

References

External links