As virtualization industry giant VMware continues to grab at marketshare, other companies in the industry are attempting to face VMware head on in the battlefront. Two contenders making a play for the SMB market are Virtual Iron and XenSource. As they continue to add features and functionality to their products to reach parity with VMware and beyond, they are attempting to do so at a much more cost effective pri As virtualization industry giant VMware continues to grab at marketshare, other companies in the industry are attempting to face VMware head on in the battlefront. Two contenders making a play for the SMB market are Virtual Iron and XenSource. As they continue to add features and functionality to their products to reach parity with VMware and beyond, they are attempting to do so at a much more cost effective price.So how do they stack up? InfoWorld’s Test Center guru, Paul Venezia, has put both products to the test for the past few weeks and recently came out with his latest report on these two vendors. He writes:VMware’s head start over the rest of the market is substantial. Leveraging nearly a decade of experience and development, VMware Infrastructure 3 has proven to be a very stable, high-performance platform, with wide OS and hardware support and a very clean and functional set of management tools in VirtualCenter (read my December 2006 review). Virtual Iron and XenSource are relative newcomers to the virtualization scene, the duo leveraging the open source Xen hypervisor. Although Xen is the core of both, the Virtual Iron and XenSource products are very different in form and function, not to mention design. I tested the two platforms on Dell PowerEdge 2950s with dual dual-core 3GHz Intel Xeon 5160 CPUs and 4GB of RAM, using a NetApp StoreVault S500 as the iSCSI back end and Cisco gigabit copper switches in the middle. The NICs in the machines were built-in Gigabit Ethernet, with the addition of another Intel NIC to provide the three-NIC layout required by Virtual Iron when using iSCSI. A low-cost multidialect filer, the NetApp StoreVault fits with the budget-conscious theme of both XenSource XenEnterprise and Virtual Iron Enterprise.He offers a quick snapshot view of the two products. Check out Paul’s bottom line results of these two products, his test rating, and more by reading his article “Xen masters take aim at VMware”, here. Software Development