10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2009

The virtualization market took a sharp turn toward the nasty, practical and cheap during 2008. [Microsoft finally shipped a version of Windows Server with a native hypervisor, effectively giving away the ability to create multiple virtual servers from one machine. That's the cheap. The nasty: Microsoft also pulled marketing stunts like sending guerilla marketers into VMware's biggest U.S. tradeshow bearing casino chips with an anti-VMware message. Market-dominating VMware shrugged off Microsoft's bravado and rolled out a host of higher-level management and data-assurance products and services, while it ramped up its marketing to emphasize its vision of an ambitious virtual data center operating system. (Catch up on what VMware CEO Paul Maritz had to say about all this at the VMworld show with this video.)

In the IT trenches, virtualization users, mostly unconcerned with the vendor spitefulness, will expand beyond the test, development and evaluation installations they ran in 2008, running more production applications in VMs during 2009, predicts Chris Wolf, senior analyst at The Burton Group. In addition to running virtual servers and server-consolidation projects, many IT shops are adding deeper layers of storage and network virtualization-making it even harder to see and manage the proliferation, performance and interaction of applications, networks and VMs that are part of a virtualized infrastructure of ever-increasing complexity, Wolf says.

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