One of our customers forwarded me a FUD e-mail that VMware has been sending to their customers comparing Virtual Iron 3.1 with VMware. This e-mail came to my attention right after our new version 3.1 announcement. It is a fascinating piece of e-mail.

I am not going to bother you with the entire e-mail. It is full of errors and mistakes...an obvious rush job. However, I will share some of the most egregious parts.

VMware: "Virtual Iron only runs on the latest servers equipped with virtualization hardware assist features. That requirement forces users to invest in the newest, most expensive servers, even for test and development pilot deployments."

Virtual Iron: We are fully utilizing the latest advances made by the chip vendors (Moore's Law marches on). Hardware enhancements to Intel® and AMD® processors improve software-based virtualization solutions. These chips go into servers from Dell, HP and IBM. I have no idea where VMware got the idea that these are the "most expensive servers" -- I just checked prices at Dell.com and, for the price of just VMware's ESX Server ($5750 per box), you can buy two Dell servers with VT and Virtual Iron 3.1 Enterprise Edition virtualization software and still have money left over to go to In-n-Out Burger.

VMware: "Virtual Iron supports only a small set of guest operating systems - RHEL 4 Update 2 (32 or 64-bit), SLES 9 Service Pack 3 (32 or 64-bit), Windows Server 2003 (32-bit) and Windows XP (32-bit). In contrast, VMware Infrastructure supports over 60 different versions of Windows, Linux and NetWare operating systems."

Virtual Iron: That's true and, thankfully, you are probably using one that we support. With emerging businesses, the 90/10 rule rules - we focus on the servers used by the majority. This means that we don't have to burden our cost structure with an obscure OS.

VMware: "Virtual Iron is missing a distributed clustered file system like VMware's VMFS. This puts every virtual machine at risk of disk corruption when placed in shared storage."

Virtual Iron: Due to our system architecture, we do not need a clustered file system to perform migration of virtual machines. When we were designing the LiveMigration feature into our product, we looked at putting a clustered file system to support shared storage (a prerequisite for migrate). We know a thing or two about clustering. Some of our technical folks invented the early clustering systems. During development, we checked out VMware's VMFS and come to conclusion that a clustered file system is the last thing we want. Why? It burdens you, the user, with heavy-duty maintenance and administration. So, instead, we built a clever mechanism that takes away that burden. With Virtual Iron, LiveMigration works on a regular file systems - without the need for clustering and without causing corruptions!

Of course, I could go on and on about the virtues of our product. I'm very proud of it. I could also go on and on about the errors and mistakes in the VMware e-mail. I won't. You can compare us to Vmware for yourself. Our Single Server Edition is absolutely free, so you have nothing to lose.