Many know that I'm an enthousiastic VMWare user. Even under Linux, I must say. Unfortunately I find that the support of Linux at VMWare is a little less then Windows. Where Windows user have a nice graphical interface to edit the vmnet settings, Linux users have to do it with a spartan shell script that recompiles the modules. Windows have automatic bridging, when I want to bridge my Wireless adapter I have to create a separate custom network adapter. But enough of the minuses: I'm very impressed with the software.

Oh yes, I know that there is Virtual Box. I haven't looked at that I must say. But honestly, VMWare does not give me any reasons for that.
Of course Oracle has also their virtualisation tool: Oracle VM. But that is not very usefull for consultants on the run. Unless you have a spare laptop that you can format, because Oracle VM runs directly on the hardware. Like VMWare ESX server. It's more a server product.

About a year ago (I think) I took the time to browse through VMWares product line and created an article that describes there product portfolio. It is in Dutch and maybe already somewhat out-dated, but you can download it here. I thought it might be usefull enough to share it though.

Browsing through their products rose my impression for them. What do you think, would it be possible for them to create a version of VMWare ESX Server, together with Live Motion technologies that span physical servers? Now they're able to transfer a live-running VM to another ESX server with nearly no outage. I learned that Oracle VM should be able to do that to. But then again the VM still runs on one physical server.

It would great if VMWare and/or Oracle would be able to run a single VM on several physical host. Then you have a grid-solution below the OS. If you look at the Oracle Database (9i Rac, 10g/11g Grid) than you talk about grid on the application level. Software providers as HP have Unix versions that have grid/failover capabilities on OS level. But I wait for VMWare Grid: grid between the hardware and the OS. What about Windows Server 2016 with 128 Processors because it runs on VMWare Grid? Or OpenSuse 13 with 256 processors?
For now, lets dream on...