Businesses using a virtualized infrastructure have many reasons to move active virtual machines (VMs) from one physical server to another. Whether the migrations are for routine maintenance, balancing performance needs, work distribution (consolidating VMs onto fewer servers during non-peak hours to conserve resources), or another reason, the best virtual infrastructure platform executes the move as quickly as possible and with minimal impact to end users.

Principled Technologies tested VMware vSphere 5 vMotion against Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with Hyper-V Live Migration. According to Principled Technologies, VMware was faster, had greater stability and less impact on application performance.

Switch on a server and you've just doubled its cost. According to Gartner, between 2007 and 2012, most U.S. enterprise datacenters will spend as much on power and cooling as on the hardware itself. Couple this with increasing infrastructure demands needed to handle the petabytes of data flowing through organizations as well as increasing energy costs, and Gartner also predicts that energy costs for IT could double by 2012.