Quoting from ComputerWorld

VMware Inc. today begins its annual user conference, which the virtualization vendor expects will be attended by about 6,000 people plus some of its rivals — one of which, XenSource Inc., will announce its first commercial software release for Windows.

XenEnterprise for Windows, which is based on the Xen open-source virtualization software, is priced at $750 for a system that can hold two physical processors. The hope is that that price is low enough to “commoditize virtualization” and attract users who might otherwise turn to market leader VMware, said John Bara, XenSource’s vice president of marketing.

VMware plans to announce a tool called Lab Manager that creates shared pools of servers for the development and testing of applications. Like the Windows release of XenEnterprise, Lab Manager is available for beta testing now and is scheduled to ship next month.

Contrasting Approaches

The two products represent very different approaches to attracting customers, said Andi Mann, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo. He said VMware is “trying to do everything” by building a set of virtualization management, migration and backup tools itself, whereas XenSource plans to develop partnerships with other vendors for such tools.

VMware developed Lab Manager at the insistence of users such as David Siles, chief technology officer for the government of Kane County in Illinois. The county’s IT staff just installed the beta release of Lab Manager on a server last week and hasn’t tested it enough to fully assess the new tool. But Siles said he thinks it will help both his systems administrators and his developers to be more productive.

For example, the developers will be able to set up applications in a test environment without having to ask for help from the sysadmins, Siles said. For the latter group, he added, “it’s one less thing that they have to worry about.”

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