While 2009 was The Year of the Upgrade, there were more than a few surprises.

We started the year with our review of server hypervisors, comparing the latest from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix/Xen. We noted a huge amount of product maturation and kept promises from all three vendors, but what really impressed us was how far Xen had come, and how consistently it could beat the competition in performance.

Microsoft's Hyper-V was no slouch in the management department, and its SC-VMM (albeit expensively) ties together virtualization with many of Microsoft's Systems-Center components. Still, VMware warmed the network operations center with vSphere's management components.

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While 2009 was The Year of the Upgrade, there were more than a few surprises.

We started the year with our review of server hypervisors, comparing the latest from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix/Xen. We noted a huge amount of product maturation and kept promises from all three vendors, but what really impressed us was how far Xen had come, and how consistently it could beat the competition in performance.

Microsoft's Hyper-V was no slouch in the management department, and its SC-VMM (albeit expensively) ties together virtualization with many of Microsoft's Systems-Center components. Still, VMware warmed the network operations center with vSphere's management components.

VMware pulled another rabbit out of its hat at the very last possible moment in our VDI comparison, with VMware View4. If we'd missed their announcement, we'd have glossed the PCoIP protocol. It was so fast that it deserved a high score. We still like Citrix's approach a lot, and Citrix does a lot more for VDI than VMware. Still, the crown had to go to VMware.

Just prior to that, we reviewed Apple's Snow Leopard, which arrived more or less around the same time as Microsoft's Windows 7. Both were iterations of prior operating systems versions. But in a historically unusual trend, Snow Leopard had a lot of updates and strange behavior that we had come to associate with a Microsoft Windows release. In turn Windows 7 seemed breathlessly, well, normal.

Both of these clients were designed to work in tune with an associated server version. Snow Leopard Server had plentiful multimedia and collaboration applications that the recent iPad announcement can anchor with.

But while Apple's applications and killer performance are certainly cool and interesting, the Windows 7 with Windows 2008 R2 combo is tough to beat as a broadly-cast, enterprise combination.

We also found a bit of bliss here and there using desktop hypervisors. VMware tried to steal the show here, as well. We found it was a good performer for both Mac and Windows XP hosts. Then a fight broke out. There are currently Parallels and VMware Fusion camps in the lab. There's a begrudging acknowledgment that VitualBox is also consistent and while very Spartan in features, it's free.

What we liked and didn't review directly were new products from Dell (their EqualLogics storage system is wonderful), Apple's new Xserve — where they cram more power into 1U than any 1U server we've ever seen, HP's 580 and 585 G5 servers that simply tear test scores apart, and simple things like how RDP works across so many platforms.

Henderson and Allen are researchers for ExtremeLabs. They can be reached at thenderson@extremelabs.com.

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