VMWare

VMWare is probably the best known brand in the market today as far as virtualization is concerned. Those of you that don't already use it will probably have heard of it. Here at PhillipsTaylorBrown, along with its primary rival Microsoft hyper-V, we have been using the VMWare ESX and ESXi server products for quite some time for many of our clients hosted solutions. To date, we have had no measurable downtime using these products and recommend them highly.

VMWare offer a variety of virtualization products (far more than Microsoft currently offer). These range from the hypervisors themselves to management, recovery, monitoring, high-availability, implementation tools and more. If you haven't already seen or used VMware's products then we recommend trying the 2 FREE versions currently available:

VMWare Server is an entry level product that sits on top of a Windows operating systems and installs just like any other application (this is known as para-virtaulization). It is then used to host mulitple virtual machines on top of that host machine without impeding any current functionality. This is what we recommend for testing and evaluation as it can sit on your workstation quite happily and can be started and stopped as you see fit.  Download it here:  http://www.vmware.com/products/server/

VMWare ESXi Server is a more advanced product and is a true bare metal hypervisor offering true 64 bit hardware virtualization. This is a much more advanced product offering Enterprise level performance & reliability and can be easily implemented in a production environment. Find out more and download it from here:   http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/

We have successfully implemented a number of VMware based solutions for our clients throughout the UK and continue to train on the products and develop new solutions based on the ever changing needs of our clients. If you already have a VMware installation and need support or help with any infrastructure changes then we can help.