Major Players and Products in Virtualization

IT Disaster Recovery Planning For Dummies

Once you’ve decided on switching to a virtualized environment, where do you go for solutions, support and products? This list represents the major players in virtualization:

VMware: The big daddy of the field. Provides hardware emulation virtualization products called VMware Server and ESX Server.
Xen: A new open source contender. Provides a paravirtualization solution. Xen comes bundled with most Linux distributions.
XenSource: The commercial sponsor of Xen. Provides products that are commercial extensions of Xen focused on Windows virtualization. XenSource was recently acquired by Citrix.
OpenVZ: An open source product providing operating system virtualization. Available for both Windows and Linux
SWsoft: The commercial sponsor of OpenVZ. Provides commercial version of OpenVZ called Virtuozzo.
OpenSolaris: The open source version of Sun’s Solaris operating system provides operating system virtualization and will also provide Xen support in an upcoming release.

About This Article

About the book author:

Bernard Golden has been called “a renowned open source expert” (IT Business Edge) and “an open source guru” (SearchCRM.com) and is regularly featured in magazines like Computerworld, InformationWeek, and Inc. His blog “The Open Source” is one of the most popular features of CIO Magazine’s Web site. Bernard is a frequent speaker at industry conferences like LinuxWorld, the Open Source Business Conference, and the Red Hat Summit. He is the author of Succeeding with Open Source, (Addison-Wesley, 2005, published in four languages), which is used in over a dozen university open source programs throughout the world. Bernard is the CEO of Navica, a Silicon Valley IT management consulting firm.