Raft Of New Announcements Cements Virtualization's Place In The OfficeRaft Of New Announcements Cements Virtualization's Place In The Office

Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun have all announced new SMB virtualization products within the last few days.It's been a busy few days for virtualization for the small office, with vendors offering hardware and servicesand, in general, some much-needed effort to make virtualization simpler and easier.

Dell not only announced new servers and server blades designed for virtualization, but announced that Microsoft Widows Server 2008 with Hyper-V would be available as a factory-installed option on Dell PowerEdge Servers. Also available will be the new Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008, which provides multi-vendor Hyper-V management. Being spared the hassle of installation would be a major benefit to small office users.

HP announced that its Data Protector, Zero Downtime Backup, and Instant Recovery software will be available in the VMware virtualization environment. With it, virtual machines can be recovered in seconds instead of hours, HP says. Also announced were new servers intended for virtualization, virtualization services, and a version of the HP Virtual Desktop Infrastructure thin-client software for the VMware environment.

Sun, meanwhile, announced two software products that it described as key components to its virtualization strategy. The two, Sun xVM Server and Sun xVM Ops Center 2.0, are free downloads for Windows, Linux and Solaris, and are said to scale from desktops to data centers and offer a 50 percent decrease in virtualization infrastructure costs.

Visit the bMighty Server How-To Center for practical, hands-on information about how to choose, install, and maintain your company's servers.

Don't miss the exclusive, downloadable guides: Servers Simplified Your Server Questions, Answered 12 Ways to Secure Your Servers 8 Ways To Reduce Server Power Consumption