Software

While virtualization has been around for many years primarily in Unix and Mainframe systems, the last few years has seen software based virtualization from companies such as VMware, Microsoft and XenSource. All of these support multiple operating systems designed to work on an Intel or AMD platform.

VMware is the market leader with Microsoft now aligning its resources to close the gap while XenSource represents the Open Source market. The goal of all of these vendors is to provide greater utilization of your current servers while providing much for flexibility and agility by supporting multiple operating systems and management tools to increase performance and up time.

While most attention from the market has been placed on Virtualizing the entire OS and application suite other vendors have focused on application virtualization such as Softricity and Trigence among others. This technique allows organizations to create a virtual environment for specific applications which will allow applications to work on non supported hardware or legacy applications that require a different set of libraries. This technique can also aid how applications are ‘delivered’ to the end user, is the application actually running on the local client or is it hosted on a central server much like Citrix.