7. PlateSpin

Known for its physical-to-virtual conversion tools and workload management tools, PlateSpin continues to win over customers even as some free conversion tools have become available, says Burton Group's Wolf. PlateSpin's P2V conversion tool, PowerConvert, has remained relevant due to its expanded use models, including disaster recovery staging and virtual-to-physical conversion capabilities, Wolf says. Also, PlateSpin added chargeback reporting to its PowerRecon product, an interesting reporting and management tool, just as many IT groups are trying to figure out how to do chargebacks to business units in the virtualized world.

8. Marathon Technologies

How do you deal with planned and unplanned downtime in a virtualized environment? Marathon's everRun HA (high availability) and everRun FT (fault tolerant) products have won acclaim—including a recent VMworld Best of Show award—for their ability to help IT ensure availability to end users. That award is even more interesting given that Marathon's products today work with Xen virtual environments, not VMware's. "VM high availability will be a significant concern in 2008 as virtualization technology improvements allow more high-end enterprise applications to run inside virtual machines," Wolf says.

9. Blue Lane

CIOs looking for an extra layer of security protection in the virtualized environment are tuning into the possibilities of Blue Lane's VirtualShield product for VMware, which aims to protect virtual machines even in cases where certain patches are out of date. The software can also automatically scan for possible problems, update problem areas and protect against some remote threats. That could be an added layer of comfort while the traditional security and management vendors catch up, some security experts say.

10. Reflex Security

Reflex's Virtual Security Appliance (VSA), which security guru and Unisys' chief architect for security innovation Chris Hoff describes along with BlueLane's software as one of the few emerging virtualization security products worth attention right now, essentially serves a virtual intrusion detection system (IDS). It adds a layer of security policies inside the physical boxes where the VMs live. Some CIOs are investigating Reflex's VSA to block potential threats like hypervisor attacks, among other possible future troubles.

© 2008 CXO Media Inc.