Bake-off: 4 Virtualization Suites (In One Review!)

Customers are grappling with the huge capital investments required to engage in software development, a necessary evil if they hope to stay on top of the competition. Moreover, distribution of systems and of the software-development process itself make applications expensive to maintain.

This new trend in software development is fueling the need for virtualized development and test environments, partly as the deployment of multitier applications across distributed data centers has become so common.

Developers might have to pass code to other groups or access systems in different locations to make sure their code works. Testers also need access to the system to evaluate the new code. Poor coordination can spiral out of control, becoming schizophrenic without virtualization. While hypervisor technology provides the infrastructure to simplify development, some management tools are necessary to streamline the development process.

Scorecard: Quick Click Comparisons of All 4 Virtualization Packages

CRN Test Center engineers evaluated server virtualization and management products from SWsoft, Virtual Iron Software, VMware and XenSource. For testing, engineers used Intel Duo core and Quad core servers along with two Hewlett-Packard notebooks. Engineers evaluated the products based on ease of deployment, management consoles, features geared toward development, price/performance and profit potential.

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