VMware slashes price of vSphere Essentials

VMware has announced that they have halved the price of vSphere Essentials, the entry level version of their core virtualisation product. Which is effectively a license for upto three Dual CPU machines.
Pitched as being ideal for small IT environments with fewer than 20 physical servers, the Essentials editions of vSphere includes the ESX and ESXi hypervisors which provide the virtualization layer that allows multiple virtual machines to share the computing, networking and storage resources of a single physical server.

If you're looking for more advanced features like High Availability or Data Recovery you'll need to dig a bit deeper, with VMware US prices list remaining stubbornly high.

With more focus from Microsoft & Citrix and a greatly improved products; the fact that Hyper-V is free and Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V is quite cheap- the get what you pay for argument can only hold up for so long. See Register article.

In an effort to remove barriers to it's use Microsoft recently confounded pundits by embracing a range of Linux guest OS's including the previously verbotten Red Hat widening it's appeal to enterprises, and particularly service providers who need to run mixed environments

So in-spite of all the marketing hyperbola what's going on in the field? Well,
Virtual Machine Company makes a High Performance Virtualization hardware appliance and we ship with either VMWare, XenServer or Hyper-V pre-installed, and our experience of late is that whilst 9 out of 10 installs are VMware - 75% of customer meetings I have attended this year also ask us about Hyper-V.

Online Webinar

One of our partner companies 360is is hosting an on-line webinar titled

"How Virtualization Demands Are Changing Hardware Choices, The Emergence Of A Virtualization Appliance"

Why not stop by it's 15 minutes long and nicely to the point - if you can't make it on the day the recording and slides are up on line as well.