Parallels, which thinks of itself as a cloud enabler, has joined the bare metal hypervisor business with a little number called Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal that leverages its desktop hypervisor and gussies it up to make it good at stuff like test and development and consolidating multiple - and not necessarily the same kind of - operating systems on a single server.

The move, which reportedly took four years to wrestle to market, puts the company in a space already occupied by VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.

The company already claims to support more than a million cloud-based virtual environments in production through its existing Virtuozzo Containers technology. Now it's looking to supply folks that want more isolation or something cheaper than VMware.

The Bare Metal mojo integrates with the company's Virtual Automation kit so cloud providers can launch new services. The combined solution features full lifecycle service delivery management for virtualized services including provisioning, upgrades, monitoring, backup and customer self-service.

It's aimed at both private and public clouds.

It's supposed to support up to 12 vCPUs, 64GB vRAM, 2TB vHDDs and 16 vNICs per virtual machine for intensive applications.

The Register says Parallels has VMware beat. It can support 64 processor sockets in a single x64 system image.

Parallels says it has also implemented Intel-specific processor capabilities, such as Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O, FlexPriority, Extended Page Tables and Virtual Processor Identification to tickle performance. That means it's better on Intel widgets than AMD widgets.

Parallels' repertoire of supported operating systems is broad.

The widgetry costs $999 per physical servers with an unlimited number of processors or VMs thrown in. Support runs $199 or $249 a server a year. Bare Metal with Parallels Containers for Linux costs $1,500 a server. And there's a starter kit for small businesses at $499 a server including support.