Introduction

After using VMWare GSX Server since the time of it’s release the opportunities of virtualization for testing and development purposes were clear to us for some time. It was a visit to one of Cisco’s European datacenters that really opened our eyes to the stability and applicability of a Virtual Infrastructure for production use.

Learning of the upcoming betatest of VMWare Infrastructure 3 (then just known as VMWare ESX3 to succeed version 2.5) we jumped to the opportunity.

I must emphasize that we already had put in a reservation for the related hardware investment in the budget for this year which made this decision a whole lot easier. But more on the budget side in later posts.