Second Life and OpenSim virtual worlds are the best known and most used by Universities and other academic institutions in the UK, according to a comprehensive study by Virtual World Watch.
They asked what use virtual worlds and why they chose them.

Second Life was chosen for his 6 years of constant development, it is not necessary to purchase a server, because of the great community that exists and the amount of resources that are available cheaply or free.

OpenSim is attractive because, compared to Second Life, ‘land’ does not carry the same expense, there are fewer security issues, there is no dependence on a single commercial vendor, and it is easier to configure how private your environment is; content can also be ported from Second Life.

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Customers need to predict how many concurrent users can be accommodated on a Sim. In OpenSim were used to a maximum of 50 avatars or even less, depending on the number of prims.

The aim of the OSGRID people was to test if the SIM code improvements made in recent weeks have been effective.

The test was made on 9 October 2009.

Their goal was to reach the 100 users (the magic number) and the result is impressive because they managed to accommodate 85 real avatars(not bots). And the server did not crash, it was still accepting connections when they reached 85, people simply stopped logging.

So how did they do it? The answer lies in three points:

1) They abandoned Openjpeg technology to decode the J2K textures

2) Using the experience of Intel’s John HURLIMAN to rewrite the server code. It remarkable that the arrival of people from IBM and Intel is pushing up the quality of OpenSim

3) Improved management of server memory.

The result is impressive, 85 avatars on an old server with less than 1 GB of RAM.

Source

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Microsoft is currently installed on Reaction Grid, a service provider that uses Open Sim as a server platform.

Furthermore, from October 31, Microsoft is abandoning its Sims on Second Life. On that very day they are celebrating an open welcome event on Reaction Grid.

On the one hand we see that Microsoft regards Open Sim as a mature enough platform. Arguably more reliable than Second Life. In fact one of the reasons why they have decided to migrate is because during an event in April 2008 that a mistake occurred and was restarted islands that teleportation system broke down.

We must also take into account that “OpenSim itself is a C # application (a part of Microsoft .Net Frame). As a result, Microsoft is very interested in providing the open platform with its own Windows Server 2008. Last week Microsoft released a case study in touting the success of its virtual servers running OpenSim.

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