Web applications can come with a long list of visualization requirements for structured data. By delivering your output through the BIRT Interactive Viewer, you can create a single BIRT design that meets multiple requirements. more
The battle between VMWare and Microsoft for the virtualization space is coming down to feature sets (for example, VMWare has Vmotion, whereas Server 2008 R2 is promising Live Migration) and opinion but not necessarily performance. It seems many are equally pleased with the performance of Hyper-V and even more pleased by the pricetag over ESX. Any thoughts on performance/functionality/pricing that motivates you from one to the other?
VMWare has a major advantage - no new hardware required. Microsoft/Xen/KVM/VirtualBox/....? All require hardware current hardware with VT enabled processor.
ESX/ESXi runs on ANY processor - I've got 3&4 year old servers running dual core AMD's 275's and it works great. Don't buy new servers - buy a small SAN & parts for your existing hardware. Hitachi & Dell both have SAS+Dual controller iSCSI in the less than $10k space - toss in some RAM & NICs and you're done! If a server dies, start up the VM's on a different server and move on. You'll save a huge amount of money on service contracts - Next Business Day is fine - saving over $1,000 per new server added to the pool.
Unless you want to run vSphere 4. New hardware, here you come! Unless of course you already have 64-bit hardware with virtualization extensions. In which case, you are safe with Xen, Hyper-V and vSphere.
ESX vs. Hyper-V: Which will you choose?