Virtualization software firm Virtual Iron has found another top OEM to vend its wares. The company today announced an agreement with Dell, which will resell Virtual Iron's server and storage software alongside the OEM's virtualization-friendly hardware.

Virtual Iron inked similar pacts with IBM and Hewlett-Packard last month.

The start-up targets VMware's rival software, claiming a similar feature set at a price more friendly to the low-end of the market. That attack was sure to appeal to Dell, which recently opened its wallet to buy virtualization-optimized iSCSI storage company EqualLogic for $1.4bn.

Virtual Iron offers their Xen-based hypervisor as a free license to customers using its software on a single four-socket server. Users can create up to 12 virtual servers with the gratis package, but need to upgrade to the Enterprise Edition (at $499 per socket) for unlimited virtual server creation; iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage; access to the Novell kernel; and various maintenance features.

The company has yet not said whether its software will be bundled with Dell hardware — as Dell plans to do with VMware.®

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