A Quick Look at Virtual Iron V 4

Today Virtual Iron is announcing Virtual Iron version 4. John Thibault, President and CEO, and my old friend Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer, took time out of their very busy schedules to chat with me about the new release. I've always been impressed with the innovative thinking shown by the folks over at Virtual Iron and this conversation reinforced that feeling.

Here's a quick description in of their announcement:

• Version 4 offers easy-to-use tools for creating, provisioning and managing the complete lifecycle of virtual machines across large numbers of physical servers. Virtual Iron states that "The new release continues to close the feature gap with VMware′s most comprehensive offering and is available at just a fraction of the cost."
• Version 4 extends Virtual Iron′s support for all primary virtualization use cases including high availability, disaster recovery, dynamic capacity management and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). It builds on Virtual Iron′s robust virtualization services, live workload migration and automated policy-based management capabilities currently deployed in hundreds of customer environments worldwide. (Virtual Iron′s products, by the way, have been supporting these scenarios for quite some time.)
• The release new production capabilities including:
  • Integration of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 kernel and drivers from Novell (means that Virtual Iron won't have to redo work that Novell's engineers have already done)
  • New physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) migration
  • A powerful graphical virtualization management interface
  • Works with Xen open source 3.1 (64-bit) hypervisor
  • Expanded 32 and 64 bit OS support
  • SMP Windows support up to eight virtual CPUs

Snapshot Analysis

Virtual Iron has wisely decided to focus their efforts on their key added value, management of virtualized environments rather than trying to also develop kernel modules, device drivers and the like. By embedding the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server kernel and drivers in its platform, Virtual Iron addresses the reliability, support and security requirements of data center managers using virtualization in production environments. Version 4 also leverages the latest multi-core technology and hardware virtualization advancements from Intel.

All in all, it would be wise of IT decision-makers to become familiar with Virtual Iron.