Microsoft & Virtualisation..
It seems to me that not many people know that Microsoft have a VERY good virtualisation product and that it's FREE.
Virtual Server 2005 R2 (http://www.microsoft.com/virtualserver) knocks the socks off of other FREE virtualisation products and is getting close to its main rival (VMware ESX Server) - it even does things that ESX can't do at the moment (High Availability). And it only gets better...
When we first shipped Virtual Server it was comparable with VMware's GSX product (sitting very high up in the software stack) and it was new - so not many people looked at it (it was never seen as a big player).
With the release of R2, we now run a lot lower down (in the kernel) and we've introduced support for x64 host machines (still 32-bit guests) - which basically means twice as many virtual guest machines per physical server, Support for non-Microsoft guest operating systems AND support for Clustering.
Now think about ANY server you have running, where you didn't consider High Availability. Use our Physical-to-Virtual tool and run that server as a virtual machine. Because Virtual Server is now cluster-able, if you ever need scheduled downtime on the physical box, just fail the resource over onto another node (hibernate: memory to disk, fail over, restore from hibernation: disk to memory) and carry on - all in about 10seconds. If the physical server ever died (for any reason), ordinary clustering kicks in and one of the remaining nodes will spin up the server. High Availability for FREE.
I'll blog again soon about what's coming down the line (where we get better than ESX)..
Dave
