What to look for in virtualization?

If you're not using virtualization yet, you probably have no idea where to even start looking. You hear about platforms, you're inundated by ads and news coverage and it's everywhere, even though it's ephemeral. No one seems to be answering basic questions, everyone assumes that you've got a virtualization infrastructure or you're getting one, and they're all saying theirs is the best.

So what do you do?

Andrew Clifford has been working hard to educate people on virtualization. Near the end of April, he produced a Virtualization Primer (part 1) to help give people a handle on the subject. He followed that up a week later with Part 2. Yesterday he put together a list of the most frequently seen virtualization platforms.

These posts serve as an excellent introduction to virtualization. You don't have to be a large enterprise entity to take advantage of it, and plenty of free solutions are available for everyone, regardless of platform.

If you're curious about what else you virtualization can help with, Philip Sellers wrote a guest blog entry awhile back about how virtualization helped him patch software, and there have been a couple other posts which mentioned it, too.

If you've got a take on virtualization, or a question, post it below and I (or more likely some other reader) can probably help you out.