Microsoft will soon be bringing to market their Hyper-V hypervisor as well as enhanced management for heterogeneous virtual machines. These products will challenge market leading VMware as they mature over the next 18 months.
Virtualization has emerged as a major infrastructure management trend with enterprises of all sizes using virtual machines for Windows and Linux server consolidation, agile development and testing environments, and business continuity. Recently, enterprises have begun to explore other strategic uses of virtualization, such as hosting desktop operating systems on a server as centrally managed virtual PCs.
