How would the virtualisation software affect your decision for each one?The term virtualization is applied in many different contexts these days. What do different virtualization schemes have in common, and how are they different? They're [all] inserting a level of indirection between the software and the hardware of the system. There is virtualizing at the operating system interface level; VMware is down at the hardware level, and then there are things like WebSphere that are up on top of everything at a Java-level interface.For each of these different techniques, you have some advantages and some disadvantages: What can it run? What performance does it run with? How confident are you of the isolation of the environment?