It's been some time coming, but Parallels has finally added a bare metal server hypervisor to its family of virtualisation products. Designed to compete with longer established tools from the likes of VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal is based on the firm's tried-and-tested technology, but with a couple of unique twists thrown in to help it stand out from the crowd.

The new hypervisor follows the usual pattern of installation straight onto industry standard 64bit server hardware without the need for a separate host operating system.

Unlike most of the competition, however, Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal is not free. Parallels contends that there's no such thing as a free lunch, and that the overall cost is the same once you factor in the cost of the required management and migration tools that are included with its product.

Moreover, the enterprise versions are licensed per-server, with no restrictions on processors or sockets, making for a very cost-effective solution, especially in larger organisations.

For our tests we looked at the Small Business Edition, which we found very easy to get up and running with. All we had to do was download a DVD image, burn it to disk, then use it to boot our test server. This was based on Intel's dual-core Xeon processors, but AMD chips can be used. Whichever server processor technology you have, virtualisation support in the form of Intel VT-x or AMD-V is required for Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal.

A simple setup routine guided us through the installation (about 10 minutes), after which we were able to point a browser at the server and download the management console, versions of which are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Up to five servers can be managed using this console, with an optional web-based tool (Par allels Virtual Automation) for larger deployments. A separate migration utility to convert physical servers to Parallels' virtual machine (VM) image format is also included.

From the Parallels Management Console we found it easy to create, edit and clone VMs, with support for up to 12 virtual processors and 64GB of RAM per VM.

You need sufficient physical resources to fully exploit these generous limits, of course, so it was good to also find tools to fine tune and balance loads more precisely. Processing power, for example, can be allocated in units of one thousandth of a CPU, with flexible virtual networking facilities another key feature.

There's support too for USB devices - unusual on a server hypervisor - enabling us to connect printers and storage devices to our VMs. We also liked the ability to connect CD/DVD drives from either the host server or the management PC to each VM, or connect remote .iso images instead. These are options which make life a lot easier when it comes to installing an operating system and applications. The inclusion of a backup tool is another very welcome option.