Is VMWare the best virtualisation company?

Drew, VMWare is one of the premiere virtualization companies in the world, but they aren't the leader is all 3 of the virtualization categories they play in.

Microsoft, Citrix and VMWare are the top 3 players in the server virtualization, application virtualization and desktop virtualization spaces.

Currently, all 3 vendors are great choices for midrange server virtualization. At the very high end, VMWare is still far and away the leader if you need to do sophisticated high-availability and other 99.99% types services.

However, they both Microsoft and Citrix rank much higher than them on application virtualization, and there is no clear winner today in desktop virtualization (as this is the least deployed of the 3 types).

Other than some licensing advantages, I don't think you need to settle for a single vendor solution here. You'll have more flexibility and less lock-in in you select best of breed for the areas you are focusing on, because there is no real overlap in management of the products across virtualization areas.

And there are more management tools coming out today that allow cross-product management of virtualization technologies.

Any 3 of the aforementioned vendors will provide value for your organization. If you could give us some hint as to the size of your organization (servers, desktops, IT support team), it might help with recommendations.

-ASB: http://xeesm.com/AndrewBaker

As far as server virtualization goes, no one is better than VMware. They have the thinest hypervisor and, having been in this space much longer than anyone else, they have the security experience and robust data center tool set that makes managing your virtual infrastructure a breeze.

For application virtualization, VMware and Citrix make a great team by using VMware to build a farm of Citrix Presentation Servers which can be easily scaled horizontally to meet load demands.

Because there is no standard yet for server virtualzation, platforms are not interchangeable. Hosting hardware becomes dedicated to whatever solution it is configured to run. To maximize your ROI, you really should standardize on a single server virtualzation platform, be it VMware, MS or Citrix. You can still select a different desktop virtualization solution, though VMware has a very good one, which teams well with thin client desktops from HP, Wyse, etc.

Citrix has a great platform as well.
If you're looking to oursource your IT, I suggest checking out Atum who have fantastic partners for their dedicated servers - http://www.atum.com