When virtualization technology first came on the market, there was a lot of confusion as to what it was and whether it could really be used for production workloads. In the beginning, it was tough going. Hosted virtualization products, such as Microsoft Virtual Server, didn’t provide the best performance. However, over time virtualization technology matured and hypervisor-based virtualization products such as VMware’s ESX Server and Microsoft’s Hyper-V were able to provide performance that’s comparable to bare-metal installations. Nowadays, virtualization is a key component of most IT infrastructures, and many companies only want to implement new virtual servers and need to justify if the server isn’t going to be virtual.
Cloud computing seems to be going through its incubation stage much as virtualization did in its early days. Some companies are testing the waters, but very few are ready to jump in feet first. Let’s see how virtualization technology vendors Microsoft and VMware are approaching the cloud.
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