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When you’re talking about virtualization platforms, there are a number of choices you have, either from established vendors, or from open-source alternatives. VMware is one of the most popular choices for virtualization, because it offers the ESXi hypervisor along with the vSphere virtualization platform. Since the hypervisor provides the main part of any foundation for virtualization platforms, it needs to be considered very carefully when you’re thinking about virtualization. One of the most popular open-source options is the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), which is one of the essential components of Linux. Below you’ll find a description of these two alternatives, and it may help you to come to a decision on which one of them best suits your circumstances.

The VMware vSphere Platform

VMware ESXi is a bare-metal hypervisor which can be directly installed onto an actual physical server, for the purpose of consolidating your hardware. The virtualization technology included in VMware allows you to create and define virtual machines, which will help you to upgrade your infrastructure. With such an upgraded infrastructure, you would then be able to manage and deliver applications which can be either new or legacy applications. If you do choose to go with VMware vSphere, you’ll have to manage virtual machines using VMware’s control stack. There are a number of different licensing arrangement levels available to anyone wishing to go this route.