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A Virtual Giant In The Making

Monday, 19 June 2006 by Michel Roth

With the release of its VI3 tools, VMware is tightening its grip on the burgeoning virtualisation market. Will VMware's new Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) suite of high-end server virtualisation tools become a de facto standard? Currently, its rivals have relatively immature offerings, though Microsoft's Veridian hypervisor, expected to arrive within two or three years, might offer serious competition. Meanwhile, the open source Xen hypervisor project is due to be included in the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

However, already Microsoft's Virtual Server software and VMware's VMware Server and VMware Player provide valuable free virtualisation tools, which means that virtualisation is no longer a niche technology for the well-heeled but can be used by everyone. And users of IBM mainframe and HP and Sun Unix systems are already running these vendors' proprietary virtualisation and partitioning tools.

VMware's VI3 pulls together its recently launched ESX Server 3 with revamped versions of management tools including VMotion, VirtualCenter and Virtual SMP, to support mainstream, x86-based servers. In addition the suite adds new features for high-availability and server load-balancing. Given these capabilities, VMware currently has the edge over its rivals.

Read the full article at ITweek.com