Virtual Iron follows trend started by VMware and Citrix to tie the hypervisor to popular OEM servers. After starting with IBM and HP, the company is now opening to Dell:
Quoting from the official announcement:
Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization software solutions, today announced a new worldwide authorized reseller agreement with Dell Corporation. Dell will work through Virtual Iron’s distribution channel and resell the software to end-users as part of an extensive portfolio of server virtualization and storage offerings…
At this point only Microsoft is missing the party (Sun will do this for sure once its upcoming xVM hypervisor will be out). But two points lead to think that Redmond software giant will soon join its competitors:
- Microsoft already has an OEM agreement with most hardware vendors to pre-install Windows into 95% of shipping servers worldwide. Since Windows is going to embed Microsoft hypervisor the company will automatically have an OEM agreement for virtualization platform since day 1.
- Microsoft is about to distribute a parallel, stand-alone version of Hyper-V (formerly Viridian / Windows Server Virtualization). This is made to address VMware ESX 3i product, but probably also to attract those hardware vendors which don’t want to offer a full copy of Windows Server 2008 on their servers.