The booming virtualization market has spawned several startups worth a close look.

SWSOFT If you think VMware is growing fast, consider SWsoft, maker of Virtuozzo. Revenue for the 600-employee company was up 98% in 2005, to $47 million. Because Virtuozzo allows many applications to run under one host system of Linux or Windows, the 5-year-old offering is most useful in hosted settings, where one operating system on a physical server can serve many customers in a series of virtual machines.

VIRTUAL IRON SOFTWARE The company's virtual machine product, Virtual Iron, was launched two years ago. Virtual Iron supplies management tools to run sets of virtual machines across servers, allowing policy-driven functions such as live reallocation of machine resources between virtual machines, automatic recovery of a failed system, and live migration of a virtual machine to another physical server.

SURGIENT Founded in 2003, Surgient makes virtual machine software used to optimize software development. The Surgient Quality Assurance/Test Lab generates virtual environments where newly developed software may be tested without harming development or production systems.

TRIGENCE This company debuted at the Demo 2006 show in San Diego, and its virtual application software makes it easier to migrate applications when upgrading from Solaris 9 to Solaris 10, or shifting from Red Hat Linux to Novell Suse Linux (or vice versa). The software monitors a running app in its old location, captures its file dependencies, then makes sure those dependencies are met when the "encapsulized" app is redeployed.

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How Virtualization Is Revolutionizing Business Datacenters