Practical Virtualization Solutions: Virtualization from the Trenches

Chapter 13. Choosing a Vendor

After you have a sense of what you want or need, as well as a budget, the real fun begins. If your company is committed to a particular vendor (and with the standardization and commoditization of hardware, this is happening less frequently), your options are limited. Relationships with vendors can change; therefore it is still important to have an understanding of how the various OEMs approach virtualization as well as various less-traditional options, such as cloud computing.

The choices described in the previous chapter extend across the major hardware vendors—IBM, HP, Dell, and Sun Microsystems—which we will examine in this chapter. All of them offer tower, rack, and blade server models, and all of them ...