Virtual Iron 4.2 - Increased Support for Production Environments

The folks at Virtual Iron have just announced that they've added some important new features to an already very powerful virtualization environment. In addition to their previous focus on consolidation, agility, optimization and availability, Virtual Iron 4.2 adds features designed to improve network performance, increase platform support and expand the product's capabilities into the area of virtual storage.

Here's what the company has to say about their updated product

Virtual Iron Version 4.2 is the first Xen®-based server virtualization solution to include:

• Multi-pathing for virtual server Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks to support business continuity and redundancy.
• LiveSnapshot™ - virtual server snapshots for hot backup and patch management. These capabilities enable offloaded, space efficient and no-downtime backups on live virtual machines running in production environments and also reduce the time for virtual machine patching in development and test processes.
• The ability to dynamically increase the size of both disk groups and virtual disks – providing increased storage on demand.

The release also adds other new capabilities including:

• Broader OS support, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, to meet demand for mainstream, production use.
• Packaged Virtual Server tools as an ISO, which appears to the administrator as a virtual CD ROM, to further simplify deployments and upgrades.

Snapshot Analysis

Those examining tools that combine virtual machine software, management of virtual resources and storage virtualization might find Virtual Iron interesting.