VMware maintains lead with Virtual Infrastructure 3 - New version of flagship virtualization product improves hardware support.

VMware has long led the x86 virtualization market with its line of hardware emulation-based products. VMware Workstation and Server require a "host" OS -- either Linux or Windows -- to run "guest" VMs (virtual machines) for a variety of OS environments, including BSD, Linux, NetWare, Unix, and Windows. The company's enterprise-targeted ESX Server product takes a slightly different approach, however. Instead of requiring a host OS, it is essentially a very thin and tightly controlled Linux-based OS that installs on a bare-metal system. Thus, it is relatively limited in hardware support, but it requires less overhead to host each virtual system and can support more concurrent …