Traditionally, the relationship between hardware and operating system has been strictly one-to-one.  That is, a single piece of hardware, whether notebook, desktop PC or server, can only run one operating system (such as Microsoft Windows or Linux) at a time.

Virtualisation breaks this one-to-one bond and allows multiple operating systems to run concurrently, yet independently, on a single computer by virtualising the physical computer's resources.   The operating systems and programs running in each virtual machine each believe they are on a separate physical computer and operate just as they would in that environment.

The benefits of virtualisation are many and compelling::

• Hardware Costs: By running multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine virtualisation makes greater use of hardware resources such as CPU cycles and RAM.  Put simply, virtualisation equals less hardware required, all other things being euqal.
• Operating Costs: Since less physical machines are required, virtualisation can deliver enormous reductions in power, cooling and hardware maintenance costs.
• Flexibility: Since virtual machines are hardware agnostic (i.e. they can be moved from one hosting physical machine to another) clients are no longer locked-in to particular hardware vendors and management of the virtualised infrastrucure is hugely simplified.
• Reliability and Availability: With the advent VMware's Infrastructure 3 technology, virtualisation powered into the business continuity/high availability arena by allowing virtual machines to exist on a cluser of physical machines.  With VMware HA (High Availability) virtual machines can be automatically restarted on a different physical machine in the advent of the failure of the original physical machine.  With VMware VMotion virtual machines can seamlessly move from one physical machine to another with zero downtime!  See the, "VMware Infrastructure 3 Demonstration" video below for a full view of this incredible technology.
• Disaster Recovery: The fact that virtual machines are entirely software enables the integration of many features that simply aren't possible with physical machines.  One of the most powerful features of VMware's technology is the 'snapshot' feature.  This allows a complete snapshot of the virtual machines state at any instant in time to be taken and perhaps saved to an external hard disk and moved to another location.  Subsequent changes, for example a software patch that causes corruption, can be entirely reversed with a few clicks of the mouse.
• Environmental Impact: Less physical machines required, less power needed all means a reduced impact on the environment.  This is something desirable and of value in and of itself to all of us and, from a business perspective, a useful marketing tool.

The answer to this question is very simple: VMware virtualisation solutions are almost universally accepted as the best in the world and the de facto virtualisation standard.  Until that situation changes, and that doesn't look likely any time soon, Cantarus will use VMware products to deliver the very best virtualisation solutions.