In a study of midmarket organizations that have implemented HP ProCurve in a production environment, IDC found that HP ProCurve provides more than sufficient functionality for their current needs and the scalability to grow into the future. more
Doing more with less. Enhanced business agility. Reduced costs. The demands on IT have never been greater, particularly in light of lower revenue and uncertain demand for the goods and services offered by many companies. There are many ways that IT can help organizations adjust to this new economic environment. Learn about five key technology trends that can immediately impact your organization's bottom line, and how to build a strategy to implement these technologies within your current budget. more
The battle between VMWare and Microsoft for the virtualization space is coming down to feature sets (for example, VMWare has Vmotion, whereas Server 2008 R2 is promising Live Migration) and opinion but not necessarily performance. It seems many are equally pleased with the performance of Hyper-V and even more pleased by the pricetag over ESX. Any thoughts on performance/functionality/pricing that motivates you from one to the other?
VMWare has a major advantage - no new hardware required. Microsoft/Xen/KVM/VirtualBox/....? All require hardware current hardware with VT enabled processor.
ESX/ESXi runs on ANY processor - I've got 3&4 year old servers running dual core AMD's 275's and it works great. Don't buy new servers - buy a small SAN & parts for your existing hardware. Hitachi & Dell both have SAS+Dual controller iSCSI in the less than $10k space - toss in some RAM & NICs and you're done! If a server dies, start up the VM's on a different server and move on. You'll save a huge amount of money on service contracts - Next Business Day is fine - saving over $1,000 per new server added to the pool.
Unless you want to run vSphere 4. New hardware, here you come! Unless of course you already have 64-bit hardware with virtualization extensions. In which case, you are safe with Xen, Hyper-V and vSphere.
ESX vs. Hyper-V: Which will you choose?