This summer, I’ve been talking with some organizations that have decided to reach out beyond VMware as they deploy virtualization in their data centers. Probably not surprisingly, the journey into x86 server virtualization typically starts with VMware. But with competitors such as Microsoft, SWsoft, Virtual Iron and XenSource revving things up with their offerings, it’s no wonder that non-VMware approaches are getting a closer look. You can read my previous interviews with the the National Association of Home Builders here, and with the Saugus Union School District in California here.

Last week, I spoke with a corporation that has decided that Virtual Iron has the virtualization software that fits its needs best. Stephen Bakerman, IT manager at Owen Bird, a law firm in Vancouver, British Columbia, told me that while the firm is small – Bakerman supports about 90 users – its plans for virtualization are big. The firm tested out pretty much all the virtualization offerings before settling on Virtual Iron. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation. Our conversation continues in the second newsletter this week, which will include more detail about Virtual Iron.

Jennifer Mears: How did you start looking at virtualizing x86 systems?

Stephen Bakerman: I had sold the firm on the idea of thin client computing, which centralized things on four servers and reduced management demands. But when people wanted updates or new programs, we had to move 25 people off of one server and across the other three, thereby increasing the load on the servers while we took down a server for testing purposes. It was very time consuming, very costly, people were complaining about the impact on performance, overloading the servers. We started to look into a solution and we saw [Microsoft] Virtual PC. At the time it looked like it would work, but when we started using the server class operating systems we ran into some performance issues, as well as compatibility issues. That was in the middle of 2005. We decided to hold off on broader virtualization plans.

Mears: When did you look at virtualization again?

Bakerman: In January of 2006, we started looking into virtualization again because things were starting to pick up in the technology race. We started playing with Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. We immediately fell in love with it. But the downside was it didn’t do virtual SMP. We had a SQL server that required that. So when Microsoft announced that Virtual Server was going to be free, and VMware came out with their free alternative, we picked up VMware and started playing with it. VMware Server gave us the USB support and the virtual SMP that we didn’t have with Microsoft Virtual Server. We realized that now we had something we could use in a production environment for a medium- to low-availability server or for full-on testing.