Virtualization has really come up as a solution for saving precious money and IT consolidation for all of us related to IT. Here I will tell you about top 4 Virtualization platforms on which I have worked, and found them very useful and robust virtualization solution.
Virtual Box:
is a powerful platform for virtualization for both 32-bit and 64-bit hardwares. VirtualBox is available for variety of operating systems like Windows, Linux, Solaris, OpenSolaris and OpenBSD.
VirtualBox has now become a very mature product offering many features for hosting your virtual machines. VirtualBox GUI is very easy to use and you can easily configure different options with it, performance of virtual machines hosted on it is what really impresses me.
VirtualBox is most probably one of the best open source platforms available for virtualization. Currently, VirtualBox 3.0 is available for download, for more information, you can visit VirtualBox site: http://www.virtualbox.org.
XenServer
is a robust virtualization platform by Citrix Systems, and is claimed to be an ‘Enterprise-Class’ virtualization platform.
XenServer is based on Xen 3.2 hypervisor platform that is native to the 64-bit architecture, it has exclusive support for Intel and AMD based hardware, and it also has many other features that enable this platform to perform better with Microsoft based operating systems. XenServer has a management featurethat makes it easier for administrators to manage the entire organization’s virtual servers through one management console, it also provides better support for cloud-based virtualization. For more details visit: http://www.citrix.com
VMware:
is also another top of the line virtualization platform, it can offer you lot of customized solutions for your virtualization needs, especially VMware ESXi is a wonderful virtualization platform that provides a stable and Enterprise-level virtualization support.
VMware also uses same hypervisor technology, which is being used by XenServer. Its virtualization platforms can be managed through its products VMware vSphere or through VMware Infrastructure, enabling its administrators to consolidate their whole VMware based virtualization environment with ease. Visit VMware official website: http://www.vmware.com
Virtual Server 2005:
is a virtualization product from Microsoft; it’s a hosted virtualization platform that requires a host operating system to run. It’s a good and reliable virtualization platform, especially for the virtualization of Microsoft based operating systems like its Server OS, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 can run on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003. It has a portable virtual hard disk format named ‘VHD’, which offers flexible usage of virtual hard disks; VHD is also compatible with Hyper-V, which is being shipped with Microsoft Server 2008.
Microsoft Virtual PC is also a small utility from Microsoft to host virtual machines on Microsoft Windows XP platform.
For more details visit Microsoft Virtual Server homepage:http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver