Virtualization crashes into Business Reality
This story starts with me trying to figure out whether I have the latest Parallels® "Power Panel", and if so, to complain to Parallels®, and if not, to complain to my hoster, HostEurope (I'm pretty happy with HostEurope - quite professional).
So, of course I login to my "Parallels® Power Panel":
You can ignore the red warning triangle clearly visible at the top: I complained to my hoster years ago: they told me it meant nothing, but if it bothers me, I should contact Parallels®. I found it difficult back then to do, and so quickly gave up over so trivial a matter.
Taking most of a day to reinstall something that should take minutes warrants a larger time investment this time around. They really should fix this.
If you have sharp eyes, you can see in the upper right hand corner, that the copyright extends to 2012. Probably good enough to complain to my hoster, but I want to know more precisely. It should be a simple matter, right?
The menus turn up nothing. The controls in the menus turn up nothing. Duckduckgo-ing* turns up nothing.
Well, I think I finally found it: click on "Status Changes" or "Resource Alerts", and then look at the hint message area under "Log Out". Do not move the mouse over a menu though, otherwise the version, "04.01.00.00.47", will be replaced with a helpful hint for the menu.
What kind of software producer doesn't want you to know the version? They usually love to tell you to just update to the latest version to fix all your problems.
Whatever, now armed with the version number, I'm off to try and find out what the latest version is, so I can ask for it.
Except Parallels® "Power Panel" doesn't seem to exist as a product anymore. Not on their website anyway. All I found was some documentation that looks older than what I already have.
I guess that it got spun off or something - an existing company wouldn't just abandon a successful product, would they?
I go back to my hoster: they seem to use a lot of terms interchangeably, that aren't entirely clear to me. The buzz words are "Virtuozzo", "Odin", "VZPP" (= "Virtuozzo Power Panel"), and, of course, Parallels®. All of the documentation I can find just assumes you already know about them.
So, let's be a little more systematic:
| website | notes |
| http://parallels.com/ | Active website. Info on Power Panel, but only old info. |
| http://www.odin.com/ | Latest news is from January - old. No PP info, but some Plesk info |
| https://virtuozzo.com.com/ | Some references to "Power Panel", but nothing obviously what I want. News is recent. Wait... |
Back up. What was the title of that news article?
"After Parallels Spin Out, Virtuozzo Refocuses on Partners and Technology".
"Virtualization platform provider Virtuozzo spun off as a standalone company from Parallels about six months ago as Odin was acquired by Ingram Micro."
Mergers, spinoffs, and acquisitions. This is not conducive to smooth transitions. But it looks like I've found my answer: the current equivalent of Parallels® (Power Panel) is Virtuozzo Containers™ (whatever they call their panel now). With the renaming, it is highly unlikely that there is a direct compatible upgrade path. Crap.
So, I've just spent a good many hours finding out that there is no one to complain to: the original manufacturer doesn't exist anymore, and the hoster doesn't upgrade because they can't.
Take all of this with a grain of salt: I haven't actually contacted anyone to confirm. To do that properly would probably take more hours, perhaps days, seeing as how all parties concerned seem to be obfuscating the truth. And I'm not willing to invest that much at this time.
*Yeah, DuckDuckGo is my default instead of Google. I'm not comfortable with Google knowing more about me than I do. I still use Google when DuckDuckGo doesn't give me the results I need.
Lessons 
- This is one of the reasons I prefer Open Source: sometimes software doesn't fit in the business plan, and suddenly you're stuck with orphaned software that you cannot fix yourself.
Resources** 
- HostEurope - a decent hoster in Germany.
- Strato - another decent hoster in Germany, for parity.
- Plesk - WebAdmin tool that works well with Power Panel
- Parallels - Original Power Panel maker.
- Odin - Original maker of Plesk? Now belongs to Ingram Micro.
- Virtuozzo - Maker of current Virtuozzo Containers™.
- Docker - Maker of a competing "containerization" software.
**Though most all of these resources are for profit businesses, I have received no money for this article or their mention. If I were them, I wouldn't give me money for this either: this article is not exactly what I'd call an endorsement.
Related blog posts
- My Odyssey to Blogging-Land
- How to: Setting up a VPS (not yet written)
Copyright © 2016 William David Herndon. All rights reserved.