What I really, really need for a virtualization product is a hypervisor based version that you can operate as a workstation - toggling between the VMs with some form of key sequence. What would be different from Workstation would be that there wouldn't be a "base" operating system - all the VMs would be running in "parallel" (pun intended), so that any VM could be restarted at any time without affecting any of the others, and all machines would have performance the same as running on the bare metal hardware. Now THAT would be a useful product!!!!
I entirely agree that that would be the ideal world, and that for such a product I would be willing to pay up to about $200 if it were on par w/ the current v.6. However I don't believe that we will be seeing this any time soon, as to do so would basically require parallels to become the OS; and an OS that exists solely for the purpose of running other OS's, if it were even legal with all of the copy rights in place, would most definitely require treading very carefully and navigating through a matrix of red tape, and public relations nightmares with companies that parallels is currently on very good terms with.
Ummm ... not sure what you mean - isn't the legal aspects of it already clarified by hyperviser VM products like VMWare ESXi, Parallels Bare Metal, Virtual Iron, Xen, etc?? All I'm saying is to take a hypervisor type machine, and allow it to be used directly (at it's own keyboard/monitor/mouse), with full access to accelerated hardware, and hot-key toggles between the VMs. I don't see it being a legal issue at all - merely a "how to get it to work" issue.
