Although its an emerging market – virtulisation is by no-way inferior – in fact its absolutely fantastic and really does yield both great technological and business benefits – there just aren’t many boundary’s to overcome any more – apart from the initial upfront investment of some powerful server(s) and storage – but the ROI is pretty quick!

I’ve recently been working on a couple of projects using VMware ESX 3.5 – perfect for growing companies who are looking to replace multiple servers as we can easily consolidate these into one (or two with failover – VMotion).

Recently we’ve seen the introduction of vSphere 4, VMware’s latests release of Virtual Infrastructure which as VMware say is:-

“the industry’s first cloud operating system, transforming IT infrastructures into a private cloud—a collection of internal clouds federated on-demand to external clouds—delivering IT infrastructure as an easily accessible service. Enable the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services with the efficiency and low cost of cloud computing—featuring uncompromising control over service levels” – VMware

All current v3.5 users with a valid VMware support contact can upgrade for free (your keys will be sent to you), We’re just looking at when backup support from Veeam (apparently already supports v4?), VizionCore and Backup Exec will be available for V4 before commercially releasing to customer sites ourselves.

More information about how vSphere can help you, visit VMware’s vSphere Website