"Once strictly the domain of software developers and QA engineers, personal and small-business virtualization products are now becoming an attractive solution for entry-level systems consolidation and foreign OS compatibility applications. These solutions run on host operating systems which do not require the overhead or usual high entry cost of professional hypervisor-based solutions, such as VMWare ESX Server, Microsoft Hyper-V, Virtual Iron, Citrix XenServer, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Oracle VM and Sun xVM Server, all of which with the exception of the first two are based on the open source Xen hypervisor.
"The market leader in this SMB/Personal virtualization space has traditionally been VMWare, which released the very first commercial x86 desktop virtualization product, Workstation 1.0, in 1999..."
