Aiming to Grow the Virtual Market Wisconsin

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Originally published at Internet.com

Virtualization vendors are taking aggressive steps to further mainstream the technology.

Earlier this year, for example, server virtualization vendor VMware debuted an offering aimed at small businesses that comprised its free, hosted VMware Server plus its VirtualCenter management platform and enterprise-class support for $1,500.

This week, OS virtualization vendor SWsoft unveiled the Virtuozzon Enterprise Starter Pack, an $1,198 entry step into the technology.

"People in large enterprises make their careers on virtualizing their infrastructures," says SWSoft CEO Sergei Beloussov.

Now it's time for smaller businesses to start to get into the act. Beloussov thinks that will happen more seriously this year and next, as the technology becomes simpler to deploy and use. "SMBs need an integrated solution to get everything in a single package and at the right price point," he says.

With the new offering, Virtuozzo also expects to encourage more departmental-level implementations at larger companies, where moving to the technology would otherwise be a top-up strategic initiative.

"It's time for bottom-up, where you get the departmental level to try virtualization for some specific workload, because it's more convenient and relatively simple and easy to buy," Beloussov says. "We want to enable that phenomenon."

The full-fledged Virtuozzo offering, to which companies may upgrade from the Starter Pack, would run a company about $5,000, a serious purchase that would require budget approval. At around $1,000, the purchase becomes a simpler proposition.

Physical to Virtual

The only difference between the Starter Pack and the full product, according to Beloussov, is that organizations are limited to running four virtual environments per physical server. But it includes the VZP2V Physical-to-Virtual tool that allows for migration from a dedicated physical server to a Virtuozzo virtual server by helping to determine what resources a server and application require, and the management toolset to provision, monitor, back up, recover, and clone virtual servers.

Virtuozzo takes a different approach to virtualization than do vendors such as VMware and Microsoft. It dynamically partitions a single Windows or Linux operating system into virtual environments. It claims the ability to support hundreds of virtual environments per physical server in the full-fledged version of its product.

Because organizations are managing only a single OS across any number of virtual environments, the company says that management tasks, including dynamic resource management, are both more efficient and faster to accomplish.

Beloussov thinks the market is going to move faster to virtualization than even the analysts are predicting, as virtualization becomes more affordable and its benefits realized by more organizations.

"Personally, I think the adoption will be faster, that virtualization will become mainstream and take a significant part of all kinds of server workloads within less than five years - maybe three years," he says. "I don't see any reason to run a physical infrastructure once you have the performance and scalability of virtualization."