This is funny. One of my colleagues here at Virtual Iron showed me some info coming from VMware that claims that VMware is less expensive that Virtual Iron. It's insulting that VMware would think customers would believe this. Let's look at this at a high level:

- Virtual Iron is $499 per socket.
- VMware is, well, pricing is somewhere in this 16 page PDF.

You must be wondering how VMware can claim to have a lower price than Virtual Iron. They claim that can produce more virtual machines per server. Which, in the right environment, may be true, however nowhere near what they claim (over double any other competitor). How many virtual machines you can have on a server depends on so many different factors - such as CPU and memory.

Virtual Iron shares CPU among all virtual servers. The overhead for virtualization is minimal....for all intents and purposes, Virtual Iron's virtualization is native. This allows us to consolidate more virtual servers per CPU than VMware. Of course, you need to look at the particular application to determine the exact ratio of virtual servers between VMware and Virtual Iron but you'll see that Virtual Iron comes out ahead in most cases.

As far as memory goes, it's true: VMware does beat out Virtual Iron by a hair. VMware creates a secondary swap file, which gives the illusion that you have more memory than you really have. That would be nice if every customer I know who uses this didn't say the performance degrades significantly. VMware also has a feature that allows you to share memory pages that are common between virtual servers. The claim is that this reduces the memory footprint up to 30%. That's a bit high. Practically, this is more like 10% -- and that's with additional performance penalties.

No matter how you run the numbers, even with VMware's additional memory features and ignoring the performance degradation, Virtual Iron is still cheaper. Whether you look at it from a per VM cost, a per socket cost, TCO, etc. - we're still cheaper. Even if you believe VMware's hype, try comparing the cost of memory to the cost of VMware...you'd still be ahead with Virtual Iron and a bit of additional memory.

And -- not that we need to -- but we're going to take all doubt away for 100 customers. If you're using VMware Server and/or VMware 2.5, we are going to give you unbeatable pricing to upgrade to Virtual Iron 3.5. This upgrade includes V2V conversions, to make your upgrade as easy as possible (easier, in fact, than upgrade to the latest from VMware).

Click here to be a part of this program.