Virtualisation Software
VMware is one of the original commercial vendors of virtualisation software (we've been using their applications for more than a decade!). VMware provides a completely virtualised set of hardware which is well supported across all major operating systems.
In recent years we've favoured deploying open source solutions such as Xen or KVM.
Benefits of virtual machines include:
- Consistent deployment to development and production environments
- Partitioning of applications to isolate dependencies and minimise unintended interaction of upgrades
- Multiple operating systems can run concurrently on the same hardware
- VMs can be cloned or live migrated to new host machines in order to scale up hardware resource as required
- Legacy applications can be more easily migrated from aging physical hardware to VMs running on modern hardware
