Over at the blog Clustering For Mere Mortals, David Bermingham has a great write up comparing the features, pros and cons of  the latest version of Hyper-V vs VMWare vSphere (previously ESX)

How do I recover my virtual machines in the event of a complete site loss? The good news is that virtualization makes this process a whole lot easier since a virtual machine is just a file that can be picked up and moved to another server. While up to this point VMware and Microsoft are pretty similar in their availability features and functionality, but here is where Microsoft really shines. VMware offers Site Recovery Manager which is a fine product, but is limited in support to only SRM-certified array-based replication solutions. Also, the failover and failback process is not trivial and can take the better part of a day to do a complete round trip from the DR site back to the primary data center. It does have some nice features like DR testing, but in my experience with Microsoft’s solution for disaster recovery they have a much better solution when it comes to disaster recovery.

Head on over to his site to get the full rundown.

Due to the critical nature of many of these patches, VMWare recommends quick evaluation and application of these patches.

ESX350-200908401-BG, Updates forcedeth driver
The forcedeth driver installed on the ESX hosts causes the NVIDIA nForce Network Controller NICs to lose network connectivity until the forcedeth driver is reloaded. This patch addresses the issue.

The affected NICS are:

• NVIDIA nForce Professional 2200 MCP 1Gbe NIC
• NVIDIA nForce Professional 2050 I/O companion chip 1Gbe NIC
• NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 1Gbe NIC

ESX350-200908402-BG, Updates VMware Tools
After performing VMotion between ESX 3.0.x and ESX 3.5 hosts, virtual machines running on ESX 3.5 hosts are restarted in order to upgrade to the latest version of VMware Tools. After applying this fix, VMware Tools function as expected.

ESX350-200908403-BG, Updates megaraid and mptscsi drivers
This patch fixes the following issues:

• When the ESX host boots, the megaraid_sas driver heap gets depleted when claiming 4 LSI SAS RAID controllers on IBM System x3950 M2 Athena servers. This issue might cause the ESX host to stop booting. The fix increases the heap size for the megaraid_sas driver from 8 MB to 16 MB.
• The mptscsi_2xx driver limits the discovery of targets to 63 SAS devices per LSI Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) host bus adapter (HBA). This fix increases the number of targets to the value returned by the HBA firmware.

ESX350-200908404-BG, Updates vmkctl
When N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) enabled virtual machines are powered on on ESX hosts, a rescan issued from the VI Client results in an error message stating that the rescan failed, even if the rescan is successful.

ESX350-200908405-BG, Updates vmkernel
Running the esxtop command on the service console of the ESX hosts lists high values for the max limited (%MLMTD) parameter for virtual machines when no max limited parameter is set. When the high values are listed, the performance of the virtual machines might be affected. In the VI Client, the max limited parameter is set in the Resources tab for CPU in Virtual Machine properties.

ESX350-200908406-BG, Updates vmx
This patch provides the following:

• Adds support for new SCSI-3 status values in the SCSI emulation for virtual machines.
• Fixes an issue where powering on customized versions of Ubuntu virtual machines from the ESX hosts might cause the ESX hosts to stop responding.

ESX350-200908407-BG, Updates kernel source and vmnix
This patch updates the service console kernel for the following fixes:

The forcedeth driver installed on the ESX hosts causes the NVIDIA nForce Network Controller NICs to lose network connectivity under certain circumstances. The affected NICS are:

• NVIDIA nForce Professional 2200 MCP 1Gbe NIC
• NVIDIA nForce Professional 2050 I/O companion chip 1Gbe NIC
• NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 1Gbe NIC

A bnx2x firmware dump issue.

The mptscsi_2xx driver limits the discovery of targets to 63 SAS devices per LSI Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) host bus adapter (HBA). This fix increases the number of targets to the value returned by the HBA firmware.

ESX350-200908408-BG, Updates bnx2x driver
This patch fixes a bnx2x firmware dump issue.

Source: Boche

VMWare ESXi is also a free product, but lacks some of the features and management abilities of the VMWare’s flagship server virtualization hypervisor product, ESX.

“Nearly every SMB stands to benefit tremendously from virtualization. VMware Go will simplify virtualization for SMBs to a few easy online steps and was designed with SMBs in mind. We want SMBs who may be sitting on the fence to realize all the benefits of virtualization without burdening their limited IT resources,” said Dan Chu, vice president, emerging products and markets at VMware.

VMware Go was developed in partnership with Shavlik Technologies, and is available now as a beta offering on at http://www.vmware.com/go/vmware-go-beta. The final version should be available in 2010.

The LISCON branded thin client from HP with LISCON OS starts a VMware View session. After moving it into another group the thin client inherits the configuration to open a published application in the seameless mode. This only takes a few moments and a Excel Window pops-up at the LISCON Desktop. Instead of a typical Windows task bar, a Mac-like dock appears.

LISCON Informationstechnologie GmbH is an Austria based company founded in 2000 that specializes in thin client management. Their Liscon OS is a customized version of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS that is stripped down and designed to run as a thin client operating system supporting VMWare View, Citrix ICA and Microsoft RDP.