Quoting from the PlateSpin official announcement / Virtual Iron official annoucement:
PlateSpin Ltd. and Virtual Iron Software today announced a new technology and business partnership that will help users assess the best opportunities for enterprise-class virtualization in their data centers and streamline solution deployment. The companies have agreed to develop joint product offerings for users and resellers as well as collaborate on marketing and sales efforts.
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With the agreement, PlateSpin, which provides software that analyzes physical and virtual resources and provides OS portability between physical and virtual environments, will support Virtual Iron’s enterprise-class virtualization and management platform. PlateSpin PowerConvert is an automated software solution that enables customers to migrate data, applications, and operating systems across physical, virtual, blade and image-based infrastructures in any direction. The combination of PlateSpin PowerConvert and Virtual Iron will provide users with the ability to migrate physical servers into Virtual Iron virtual infrastructure to quickly achieve the benefits of large-scale server consolidation, rapid provisioning, high availability and capacity management. General availability is planned for November.The companies also announced that they will make available PlateSpin PowerRecon with support for Virtual Iron at the same time.
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Virtual Iron will bundle one free migration of PlateSpin PowerConvert with every Virtual Iron Consolidation and Enterprise Edition license. Subsequent migrations will be available for purchase from Virtual Iron and PlateSpin authorized resellers. Virtual Iron will also offer a server assessment solution as well as a server consolidation bundle through its network of authorized resellers…
This announcement is indeed interesting.
PlateSpin is at the moment the unquestioned leader of P2V migrations market, being the only solution able to seamless support multiple virtualization platforms, virtual operating systems and complex migrations (V2P, V2V).
The fact PlateSpin, already supporting VMware and Microsoft products, now introduces support for Virtual Iron means 2 things:
- PlateSpin believes Xen (which Virtual Iron will use as virtualization engine for its upcoming 3.0 version) will likely be used in corporate environments
- PlateSpin preferred the Xen implementation provided by Virtual Iron over the one provided by XenSource
At this point will be interesting to see which support will be provided by key producers of multi-virtualization platforms, like SWsoft.