According to the news that virtualization.info broke yesterday, Dell announces today its new server for virtualization: the PowerEdge R805 and 905 (two sockets the former, four sockets the latter).
The hardware comes with an interesting configuration (AMD Quad-Core, 16 DIMM slots, integrated quad-ports NIC with TOE, up to 292GB local storage, etc.) and the option to pre-install a couple of hypervisors: VMware ESXi and Citrix XenServer Embedded Express (renamed XenServer Dell Express Edition).
The VMware lightweight hypervisor, which was supposed to be free, is priced $99.
The Citrix hypervisor for OEMs, which already made its way into HP machines, is priced $299.
Both are loaded at boot from an integrated SecureDigital card slot but could also load from an internal USB port:
In the coming weeks Dell will offer the two products also with other PowerEdge series like the new R900 (Intel-based), the dear old 2950 and the M600 blabe systems.
Update: Dell already published the VMmark benchmarks for the new R905, which achieved the best performance among others 16 cores (4 sockets) systems from IBM, HP and Sun. Even better than the Intel-based Dell R900.