I am in the process of putting a virtualization plan in place and wondering, from a pure virtualization perspective, which hardware vendor provides the best virtualization solution? Would like to know if any of you have had any experiences using virtualization on DELL hardware, SUN, HP or IBM hardware. Also wondering, if any of you were able to get a decent discount from any of these hardware or vitualization software vendors. Appreciate your help.
We have had really good luck with super micro. Also depends on your budget and needs you could use simple commodity hardware even.
Go to concur with this. Supermicro make some great servers and are always at the cutting-edge of the latest technology so the latest CPU's are never an isue with them. We're almost exclusively Supermicro, and have been for years, and their hardware is super-reliable. We've also got some HP servers that are very (very) nicely constructed and just ooze quality, but they're a little behind the tech curve for some things. I wouldn't rule them out though.
It's true that the virtualization layer is software, but there's more and more specialized hardware support for virtual environment that increase security and/or performance, so hardware is an important element of the overall design in a hosting environment.