Virtual Iron Beefs Up Server Virtualization with Version 4

Published: September 4, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The run for the money is in full swing for server virtualization, and now that VMware has gone public and is now worth nearly $26 billion and XenSource is in the process of being eaten by Citrix Systems for $500 million, it is a lot easier for any vendor of virtualization products to make noise. But it is also getting more difficult to be heard over the cacophony. Virtual Iron, which has been chasing server virtualization as long as XenSource and which uses a variant of the Xen hypervisor, is one of the louder vendors in the space aside from the big two.

This week, trying to steal a little thunder ahead of the VMworld 2007 event being hosted by VMware in San Francisco, Virtual Iron is launching Version 4 of its eponymous server virtualization tool set. Virtual Iron 4, like its predecessor, includes a variant of the Xen hypervisor--Xen version 3.1 in this case--wrapped with software developed by Virtual Iron years ago that not only allows a server to be carved up into virtualized slices, but also allows multiple physical servers to be ganged up to present a single image for the hypervisor to use. This latter bit is something that neither VMware's ESX Server nor XenSource's XenEnterprise hypervisors can do, and Microsoft's future "Viridian" hypervisor for Windows Server 2008, formerly known as Longhorn Server, will not have this capability, either, when it is in customer hands maybe in May or June 2008.

As has been the case for the past year, Virtual Iron has been trying to position its software as providing the same functionality or more as VMware's ESX Server and the related Virtual Infrastructure 3 extensions at a price that is competitive with XenEnterprise virtualization tools. VMware dominates the server virtualization space because of the sophistication of its products, and customers have thus far been willing to pay a hefty premium for functionality and compatibility; ESX Server is by far the most certified hypervisor on servers, and the most widely distributed. But that doesn't mean there is room for players like Virtual Iron, XenSource, and others.

With Virtual Iron Version 4, the company is moving to the 64-bit version of the Xen 3.1 hypervisor, to which Virtual Iron, among many others, have contributed code as part of the open source Xen hypervisor project that was initially created by XenSource several years ago. Virtual Iron Version 4 supports up to 128 GB of physical memory (in one box, spread across as many as 16 boxes, or somewhere in between) and a guest virtual machine riding atop of the hypervisor can have as much as 32 GB of memory for itself. The Xen 3.1 hypervisor also supports eight-way SMP clustering inside of a VM (in this case, this means up to eight CPU sockets, regardless of how many cores are involved), and the hypervisor now knows about ACPI power management, too, enabling the hot-plugging of processors. This extended SMP support is important for Microsoft Exchange Server groupware and SQL Server database workloads. Obviously, 32-bit as well as 64-bit operating systems can be run on Virtual Iron.

Virtual Iron Version 4 also has Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 1 kernel and drivers integrated into it, which is how the Virtual Iron hypervisor boots itself onto a bare metal server. VMware uses a variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 for this purpose, while XenEnterprise uses a variant of Debian Linux. The integration of the SUSE Linux kernel and drivers for the Virtual Iron hypervisor means SUSE Linux is a lot easier to support above the hypervisor as well. (It is not clear if this confers any performance benefits compared to other Linuxes.)

On the operating system front, the updated Virtual Iron product supports Microsoft's Windows Vista and Windows 2000 operating systems, expanding beyond the already existing support for Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 has been added to the support matrix, alongside the existing RHEL 4 and CentOS 4.4; the company has not yet announced its support plans for RHEL 5, which was announced in March of this year. SLES 9 and SLES 10 are supported on Virtual Iron's implementation of the Xen hypervisor, and so is Oracle Enterprise Linux 4.

Virtual Iron already has LiveMigrate, a feature for teleporting running VMs around virtualized servers connected over a network, as well as LiveCapacity, a dynamic resource allocation feature, and LiveRecovery, a means of moving VMs when hardware is failing to maintain VM uptime. Rather than create its own physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual image creation software, Virtual Iron is partnering with PlateSpin to gain P2V and V2V capability. Virtual Iron is embedding a version of PlateSpin's PowerConvert tool in a high-end variant of its own product and is renaming the feature LiveConvert to be consistent. The new release of Virtual Iron also has a graphical management console that runs on Windows machines and graphing and reporting tools to help with capacity planning for virtualized environments.

With Virtual Iron Version 3, the company offered a freebie version aimed at a single physical server and offering up to 12 VMs on a single processor with local disk storage. Virtual Iron Enterprise Edition offered unlimited numbers of VMs, virtual SMP inside a machine; local disk storage or iSCSI or Fibre Channel SAN storage; LiveMigration and LiveMaintenance patching, and standard business support for $499 per processor socket. With Virtual Iron Version 4, the company is adding a new bundle, called Extended Enterprise Edition, which adds in LiveRecovery and LiveCapacity features, the LiveConvert P2V and V2P conversion from PlateSpin with up to six P2V conversions and two V2V conversions per CPU socket, and all the other capabilities of the Enterprise Edition for $799 per socket.

According to Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron, the functionality in Virtual Iron Version 4 Extended Enterprise Edition is roughly akin to the Virtual Infrastructure 3 stack from VMware, which runs $2,875 per server processor socket. XenEnterprise 4, which was just announced a few weeks ago as Citrix was buying XenSource, has similar functionality, but does not have P2V and V2V transformation bundled in and the storage management features that were announced through a partnership with Symantec will not be ready until later this year, and will also drive the price of XenEnterprise 4 above the current $1,250 per socket. Many of the features that XenSource is bragging about in XenEnterprise 4 have been in Virtual Iron products for more than a year. Virtual Iron is committed to competing on features and price, and has been doing so for years. Which is why the company has hundreds of customers even though it is much smaller than VMware.

Virtual Iron Version 4 will be available on September 10.

As for the acquisition of XenSource by Citrix, Virtual Iron is not worried about this as it relates to its conversion from its own proprietary hypervisor to Xen, which the company did back in April 2006. "The Xen project will move to a more open, traditionally managed, independent project, complete with third party governance," says Grandinetti. "This is a positive step forward."

While this is certainly true, Citrix has paid $500 million for XenSource, and it will do everything in its power to make that investment pay off, which probably means Virtual Iron will feel some increasing competitive heat.

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