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Virtual Iron - enterprise-class Virtualization software

Virtual Iron provides enterprise-class virtualization software solutions for server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management.

Virtual Iron offers comparable capabilities to VMware for one-fifth the cost and delivers all the benefits of primary virtualization use cases. The software provides advanced virtualization capabilities that leverage industry standards, open source economics and built-in hardware-assisted acceleration. These solutions enable companies to:

Improve the utilization of current systems and get more out of today’s industry-standard hardware via partitioning and consolidation

Quickly and economically deploy software to set up development, test and production environments

Match resource capacity to workload demands via workload management capabilities

Recover from failures quickly, reliably and cost-efficiently via high availability and disaster recovery capabilities

Reduce human labor and errors via policy-based management

Reduce the cost of managing, maintaining and securing desktop infrastructure.

The Virtual Iron Platform

Open Source Hypervisor
The open source hypervisor project provides the foundation for Virtual Iron. It leverages the hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities built into Intel™ and AMD™ processors to create an abstraction layer between physical hardware and virtual resources. Virtual Iron extended the open source hypervisor to support 32- and 64-bit operating systems running concurrently on a shared hardware, up to 8 CPUs per guest operating system, up to 96 GB memory, and multiple storage and network adapters.
Virtualization Stack
Virtual Iron's virtualization stack sits on top of the open source hypervisor. The virtualization stack includes dynamic infrastructure life cycle management, server partitioning, and LiveMigrate™, a feature allowing virtual servers to move between physical servers without pausing operating systems or applications. In addition, Virtual Iron provides storage and network connectivity, high-performance I/O for near native performance, multi-pathing, and resource monitoring for automatic recovery of virtual servers in event of failure.
As a result, users get streamlined data centre management and reduced operational costs.
Virtualization Manager
This product includes a system manager allowing centralized control of the virtualized infrastructure.
Virtualization Manager includes advanced features such as a built-in policy based engine and an event monitor to optimize application performance, ensure high availability and simplify virtual and physical resource management. Virtualization Manager also enables rapid provisioning and reconfiguration, through operating system templates and cloning. These features streamline tasks that are normally highly manual and time-intensive and significantly reduce the complexity in the data centre.
The virtualization manager is easily accessed via web based GUI interface or through a set of CLI command.
The Advantages of Virtual Iron
Virtual iron's enterprise-class virtualization solutions provide centralized, policy-based virtualization management for a shared pool of dynamic server, storage and network resources.
The software delivers a unique set of advanced virtualization capabilities that set Virtual iron apart from other offerings in the market: Native Virtualization - Virtual iron's approach to virtualization is efficient, easy to manage and based on open source virtualization.
The software dramatically streamlines virtual infrastructure management and reduces operational costs by:

leveraging hardware assisted virtualization capabilities from Intel and AMD for optimal virtualization efficiency

allowing 32- and 64-bit x86 operating systems to run unmodified and concurrently on a partitioned server

requiring no installation or management of the virtualization layer

virtualizing all data center resources including servers, networks, and storage
Policy-Driven Management
Virtual iron's unique, policy-driven automation simplifies the management of computing resources and enables rapid provisioning and deployment without increased administrative overhead.
Features like:

LiveMigrate

LiveCapacity

LiveMaintenance

LiveRecovery

enable automated and dynamic resource management.
Price/Performance Leadership
Open source economics and efficient use of physical resources provide dramatic cost reductions. Hardware-assisted virtualization minimizes overhead to provide virtualization benefits to the broadest range of applications. These capabilities allow users to optimize physical and people resources by transforming the data center into an efficient pool of shared computing resources that are dynamically configured and managed via software; the ability to run any application, anywhere, any time.
Virtual Iron vs. VMware Virtual Iron offers comparable capabilities to VMware at one-fifth the cost. VMware and Virtual Iron are the only two server virtualization providers to offer transparent workload migration capabilities. This enables support for more advanced virtualization use cases such as business continuity applications like high availability and disaster recovery, dynamic capacity management and server-hosted virtual desktop infrastructure.
Key Benefits of Virtual Iron

Sophisticated policy-based management and automation

Ability to take full advantage of Intel VT and AMD-V hardware-assisted virtualization for better performance and lower overhead.

Support for enterprise-class workloads - up to 8 CPUs and 96GB of memory in virtual servers.

Unmodified 32 & 64 bit guest OS support

See for Yourself

Watch a short video demonstration showing the creation of virtual servers in a matter of minutes and a few easy steps.