Release: Virtual Iron Version 4.0

Virtual Iron announced the latest release of its server virtualization platform and virtual management solution.

The company hopes that Version 4 of its software will continue to chip away at VMware's lead in the market with Virtual Infrastructure 3. Virtual Iron said that Version 4 provides comparable capabilities to VI3 and is still available at just a fraction of the cost.

This new major release sports some remarkable improvements like:

• 64bit hypervisor architecture
• 8-way virtual SMP
• new management GUI
• Support for Windows Vista and 2000 and for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 guest OSes
• Integration of optimized drivers for Novell SuSE Enterprise Server guest OS
• Integration of PlateSpin products under LiveConvert name

LiveConvert - P2V and V2V Conversion Capabilities Powered by PlateSpin - Version 4 adds LiveConvert, an automated software solution powered by PlateSpin that enables customers to easily migrate workloads (data, applications, and operating systems) across physical, virtual, blade and image-based infrastructures in any direction. LiveConvert provides Virtual Iron users with the ability to quickly migrate workloads between physical servers and virtual machines allowing users to quickly achieve the benefits of large-scale server consolidation, rapid provisioning, high availability and capacity management.

New Graphical Management Console Interface – Version 4 adds a powerful new Windows graphical administration console including new management wizards for creating new virtual machines and managing their entire lifecycle. The console also includes new graphing and reporting tools for measuring resource utilization and performance including CPU, memory, disk and network I/O. These capabilities simplify management of the entire virtual environment.

New Xen 3.1 64 Bit Hypervisor – Virtual Iron continues to contribute to and leverage the latest advancements in the Xen open source project. Version 4 integrates the Xen 3.1 hypervisor for increased scalability, increased memory density, support for up to 128 GB of physical memory, and per guest virtual machine limits of 32 GB. The new hypervisor also supports up to 8-way SMP per guest and leverages ACPI to support dynamic hot plugging of CPU, network and storage running into virtual machines. As a result, users can support a larger number of virtual machines per host, increasing utilization and ROI.

Expanded OS Support - Virtual Iron Version 4 adds support for several new 32 and 64 bit operating systems including Windows Vista, Windows 2000 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. This enables Virtual Iron to continue to expand mainstream adoption, provide support for diverse data center environments and increase user flexibility and value.

Windows SMP Support - Version 4 expands support to virtual machines with up to 8 CPUs, for the ability to virtualize more demanding workloads such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server.

These new features add to Virtual Iron's already comprehensive server virtualization and virtual infrastructure platform including advanced policy-based automation capabilities which allow data center managers to monitor and automatically manage the capacity of their server resources to deliver on established service level agreements (SLAs). These include easy-to-use capabilities such as:

LiveMigrate - the ability to move virtual servers between physical servers without any application downtime;

LiveCapacity - monitors virtual server CPU utilization to determine when a workload needs additional capacity and live migrates it to a physical server when needed;

LiveRecovery - monitors the status of physical resources and moves virtual servers to maintain uptime in the event of a hardware failure;

LiveMaintenance - moves virtual servers to alternate locations without downtime when a physical server is taken offline for maintenance. This allows physical server maintenance to be performed outside of scheduled maintenance windows without downtime.

LiveProvisioning – a "zero touch" automated deployment capability that eliminates the need for physical installation or management of virtualization software on virtualized physical servers.

"Virtual Iron Version 4 continues to keep pace with the industry's most-advanced offerings and is substantially more feature-rich, higher performing and easier to deploy than XenSource's latest offering," said John C. Thibault, president and CEO of Virtual Iron. "With Version 4, we continue to bring the most comprehensive enterprise-class virtualization and management capabilities to the mainstream market at a fraction of the cost of comparable alternatives."

The company said Version 4 should be generally available on September 10, 2007

The original version here...