Parallels Workstation is the first commercial software product released by

Parallels, Inc. Parallels is a software company based in Bellevue, Washington; it is primarily involved in the development of virtualization software for macOS. The company has offices in 14 countries, including The United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Fran ...

, a developer of desktop and server virtualization software. The Workstation software consists of a

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

suite for

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 ser ...

x86-compatible computers (running

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

) (for Mac version, see

Parallels Desktop for Mac Parallels Desktop for Mac is software providing hardware virtualization for Macintosh computers with Intel processors, and since version 16.5 also for Apple silicon-based Macintosh computers. It is developed by Parallels, since 2018 a subsidiary ...

) which allows the simultaneous creation and execution of multiple x86 virtual computers. The product is distributed 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 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-a ...

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-as ...

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 Processor may refer to: Computing Hardware * Processor (computing) **Central processing unit (CPU), the hardware within a computer that executes a program *** Microprocessor, a central processing unit contained on a single integrated circuit (I ...

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

floppy drive A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...

CD drive In computing, an optical disc drive is a disc drive that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves within or near the visible light spectrum as part of the process of reading or writing data to or from optical discs. Some drives can only ...

, 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 platters coated with magn ...

– everything a physical computer contains. Parallels Workstation virtualizes all devices within the virtual environment, including the video adapter,

network adapter A network interface controller (NIC, also known as a network interface card, network adapter, LAN adapter or physical network interface, and by similar terms) is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network. Ear ...

, and hard disk adapters. It also provides pass-through drivers for

parallel port In computing, a parallel port is a type of interface found on early computers ( personal and otherwise) for connecting peripherals. The name refers to the way the data is sent; parallel ports send multiple bits of data at once ( parall ...

and USB 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 is able to 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 mainboard, main circuit board, mb, mboard, backplane board, base board, system board, logic board (only in Apple computers) or mobo) is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expand ...

compatible with

P965 chipset. * Up to 64 GB of

. *

VGA Video Graphics Array (VGA) is a video display controller and accompanying de facto graphics standard, first introduced with the IBM PS/2 line of computers in 1987, which became ubiquitous in the PC industry within three years. The term can now ...

and

SVGA Super VGA (SVGA) is a broad term that covers a wide range of computer display standards that extended IBM's VGA specification. When used as shorthand for a resolution, as VGA and XGA often are, SVGA refers to a resolution of 800×600. History I ...

video cards with

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

VBE VESA BIOS Extensions (VBE) is a VESA standard, currently at version 3, that defines the interface that can be used by software to access compliant video boards at high resolutions and bit depths. This is opposed to the "traditional" int 10h BI ...

3.0 support and up to 256 MB of VRAM. * A 1.44 MB

, 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 t ...

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

serial port In computing, a serial port is a serial communication 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 parallel. ...

s that can be mapped to a real port, to a pipe or to an output file. * Up to three bi-directional

s, 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 1 ...

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 communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. I ...

support. * USB 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 in 1997. The standard was used in motherboards, modems, and sound cards. The specification covers two types of compo ...

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 or

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging ...

. To run 64-bit guest operating systems, a processor supporting the

hardware virtualization technology is recommended. * RAM: at least 2GB is required, but 4GB and above is recommended.

References

External links