Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov sent around his response to Microsoft’s surprise release of Hyper-V last week:While he figures it’ll lower the barriers to server virtualization adoption – and tear a piece out of VMware’s hide – “the breath of 20 deployments will still be fairly narrow…the feature set of Hyper-V is limited...with no support for Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, FreeBSD.”

Then to his real point: “From a virtualization perspective, Hyper-V isn’t really a threat to us as we deliver an OS-level server virtualization solution, Parallels Virtuzzo Containers, which solves a different set of problems than Hyper-V. This means we can offer a set of strengths suited for a more diverse range of workloads, from high-performance workloads such as databases, which are unsuited to hypervisors due to the throughput degradation, to Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure, where the density and storage efficiency are key.”

Parallels, by the way, has put its Virtuozzo Containers on HP’s Itanium-based Integrity servers for $4,500 per two processors. Its Virtuozzo Containers/Parallels Infrastructure Manager bundle is $5,000.