Cloud computing and virtualization is changing the IT world in a way which is unprecedented in the last decades. The economy of scale and predicable performance is pushing cloud computing and virtualization across the enterprises. A significant part of the cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure available in world consists of reliable services delivered through data centers such as Amazon. In principle, cloud computing and virtualization customers do not own the physical infrastructure, instead avoiding capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider.
Although cloud computing is a very promising paradigm, still not every company would want to use public clouds. Especially for core applications and applications with sensitive data, enterprises lean towards private clouds. However, the advancement in the so called virtual private cloud area are currently bringing private and public clouds closer together.
There are many technology options available today for cloud computing and virtualization.
VMware
VMware was and still is a pioneer in the Virtualization and Cloud Area. Most of the virtualization and cloud software running in Enterprises today comes from VMware, where they still have an enourmous market share. High availability, performance, reliability and the advanced management infrastructure are the key strength of VMware.
VMware brings unique characteristics to the table, designed to serve the needs of businesses that want production-level performance and reliability.
VMware vSphere: Leveraging key technology advancements found in VMware vSphere, users get the assurance that applications can be managed, moved and operated in the cloud both public and private clouds. VMware vSphere aggregates and holistically manages large pools of infrastructure—processors, storage and networking as a seamless, flexible and dynamic.
VMware ESXi and VMWare Server: Besides vSphere, VMware also offers VMware ESXi, which can be used as initial virtualization platform. Once a user is convinced of the value, he can move to more advanced VMware vSphere stack.
Both VMware vSphere and VMware ESXi / VMWare Server are players in the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) area.
Microsoft
Microsoft's cloud offerings have the Hyper-V and the Windows Azure Platform
Hyper-V: Microsoft Hyper-V is a traditional hypervisor based virtualization system that can be used for computers on an Intel basis (x86). Hyper-V can be used to enable a very cost effective virtualization solution. Hyper-V supports mixed OS virtualization with Windows and Linux systems. Hyper-V is a player in the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) area. This means that any type of OS and any type of applications / services on top of the OS can run on Hyper-V. There is no vendor lock-in since the applications / services running inside the Virtual Machine can easily be transferred to a different IaaS offering.
Windows Azure platform: Windows Azure Platform offers a familiar Microsoft development environment to create cloud applications and services. In order to do this, the Windows development environment is mandatory. Because Windows Azure offers a development platform, it represents a so called PaaS (Platform as a Service). This means an application or service has to be specifically developed to run and take advantage of this platform. Once developed, the application or service is bound to this platform (vendor lock-in). The big advantage is that the application / service can use the Azure built-in services that enable e.g. enormous scalability.
Open Source Hypervisors (Xen/KVM)
Xen is an open source hypervisor project initiated by Citrix. The latest offering Xen 4.0 adds significant memory and security optimizations that will drive virtualization infrastructure forward.
In the open source community it is currently unclear if Xen or the hypervisor that is built into the Linux kernel (=KVM = Kernel-based Virtual Machine) will prevail in the future. This unclarity will further strengthen the already very strong position of commercial hypervisor vendors like VMware.
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