Discussion on:

Virtual Iron secures another $20 million financing

Are you using VMware or Virtual Iron in your organization?

We are a small company that made the choice of Virtual Iron over VMWare for mostly the same reasons in the original post. Before making the ultimate decision, we did test the two products side by side. Not only does Virtual Iron have almost all the capabalities that VMWare ESX server does, but it cost roughly 1/5 less than VMWare! Yipee! That means more hardware! When I have to count every single penny and justify the cost, Virtual Iron just seemed to make more sense. It is a robust and easy to use product that has allowed us options generally left to much larger corporations, and much bigger budgets.

Sometimes it is nice to see healthy competition to force innovation, but the reality is that VMware is the industry standard in the x86 space for many reasons.

VMware is in their 3rd generation of core technology, meaning they have a stable product, released code in the Fortune 1000 install base to show their products work, and they have extensive data center ready management capabilities which are not vaporware.

VMware's ISV and partner program is unmatched in the industry, making VMware technologies solutions such as Cirba and Vizioncore two of the ten technologies CIOs are interested in (See CIO Magazines recent comments from December 2007, I believe).

Like all good technologies, the me-too's will catch up and this market will commoditize.

The questions are how much will it cost in R&D for Virtual Iron to get to an even playing field while VMware re-invents?

And

Will VMware be the next EMC or will they evolve?


John Dunham