Virtualization

Benefits of virtualization include:

* Hardware consolidation reduces capital expenditures and energy costs
* Standardization of operating systems reduces errors
* Rapid provisioning improves time-to-market
* Automation reduces staffing costs
* Physical servers are made more interchangeable
* Portability improves availability, recovery, and flexibility

Citrix XenServer
XenServer provides unique advantages and benefits, such as:

* Unique Management Architecture – eliminating single points of failure and providing detailed monitoring
* Industry-leading Low Overhead – offering near bare metal performance
* Plug and Play Storage Architecture – allowing control over advanced storage functions
* Dynamic Workload Management – workload streaming from the network to both physical servers and VMs
* High availability – allowing VMs on a failed host to automatically restart on another physical server
* XenMotion Live Migration – migrating VMs between physical servers with zero downtime

Microsoft Hyper-V
Hyper-V delivers a comprehensive feature set, including:

* Broad OS Support – simultaneously running diverse OSs (including 32-bit and 64-bit)
* Symmetric Multiprocessors (SMP) Support – emulating up to four multiple processors per VM
* Live Virtual Machine Snapshot – improving overall backup and recovery
* Windows Clustering – integrating up to 16 VMs on the same physical system
* Quick Migration – migration of running VMs between physical systems with minimal downtime

VMWARE
VMware delivers on core business virtualization requirements, including:

* Complete Virtual Platform – delivers live migration, aggregation, allocation, power management, and high availability
* Reliable Foundation – provides a robust and production-proven hypervisor
* Comprehensive Virtualization Management – allows centralized management of virtual machines
* Integrate with Your Infrastructure – creates a strong support ecosystem that integrates with existing solutions
* Low Total Cost of Ownership – maximizes virtual machine density per physical machine