Virtualization platforms
Gold Award:
VMware vSphere 4
A strong server virtualization platform lays the groundwork for a high-performing virtual environment, but the options are ever-increasing.
Several major vendors offer proprietary platforms, but there are also open source hypervisors based on Xen and the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (or KVM) as well as other approaches that don't involve hypervisors at all. Several new virtualization platforms hit the market in 2009, and here we award three of the best in the Virtualization Platforms category.
The release of VMware Inc.'s vSphere 4 takes virtualized infrastructure to the next level. Many organizations have already realized significant savings from their virtual environments and have taken advantage of virtualization's management benefits. But with vSphere 4, new levels of performance, protection and functionality are now possible.
The changes from vSphere's predecessor VMware Infrastructure 3 are substantial, and the upgrade is not too much to handle for most environments.