VMWARE SERVER

VMware software is the leading virtualisation platform used by enterprises large and small to increase IT efficiency, decrease costs and respond faster to changing business demands. VMware Infrastructure leverages a company.s storage, network, and computing resources by creating virtual services from the physical IT infrastructure, enabling on demand resource allocation.
What kind of IT issues does VMware help solve? VMware is the most widely deployed software for optimising and managing IT environments to provide the following business solutions:

Server Consolidation & Containment: Reduce the total cost of server ownership and increase hardware utilisation. Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery: Decrease unplanned downtime with reliable, cost effective disaster recovery. Enterprise Desktop Management: Reduce security risks and improve manageability of desktop computing. Software & Development Test: Increase productivity, decrease costs and improve software quality.

MICROSOFT VIRTUAL SERVER

Microsoft Virtual Server is a virtualization solution that facilitates the creation of virtual machines on the Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 operating systems. Originally developed by Connectix, it was acquired by Microsoft prior to release. Virtual PC is Microsoft's related desktop virtualization software package.

Virtual machines are created and managed through an IIS web-based interface or through a Windows client application tool called VMRCplus.

The current version is Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. New features in R2 SP1 include Linux guest operating system support, Virtual Disk Precompactor, SMP (but not for the Guest OS), x64 Host OS support (but not Guest OS support), the ability to mount virtual hard drives on the host OS and additional operating systems including Windows Vista. It also provides a Volume Shadow Copy writer which enables live backups of the Guest OS on a Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 Host.

Limitations

Known limitations of Virtual Server, as of September 2007, include the following:

Although Virtual Server 2005 R2 can run on hosts with x64 processors, it cannot run guests that require x64 processors (guests cannot be 64-bit). It also makes use of SMP, but does not virtualize it (it does not currently allow guests to use more than 1 CPU each).