VMWAREstill king?

[jrdonnaruma]

The only enterprise level companies I know of that actually use 'custom stuff' are companies that build said products, and then sell them as well as use them in their own environments, or they pay another company to roll a custom solution, and then pay them ontop of that to support it as well. Seldom do you get enterprise level business rolling and supporting their own configurations.
There are several reasons for which. One is cost, it costs more in payroll to build and support your own solution internally, than it does to buy and be supported by a third party vendor. Two is the little issue I call 'reliable support'. If the person/team who built the solution gets fired, or transferred, or quits, or retires, then said company is SOL unless they had AMAZING documentation, and even then, its going to cost considerable amounts of time (read MONEY), to get the new guy(s) up to speed on that product. Those two reasons alone, specifically the costs, are the reasons most enterprise companies don't roll their own solutions.

Now, if they roll their own solutions and plan on selling that solution as well, then that is a completely different story altogether.

 

[Vengance_01]

For small companies free can be great so long as you have someone to maintain it and troubleshoot. It saves money allows for them to re-invest the money back into company. But for larger companies, Vmware is a proven solution that works. My company we are moving to ESX 4.0 and are in the process of converting all of our physical servers into VMs.