Virtual Iron Adds iSCSI Support to Server Virtualization

Published: March 6, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server virtualization software maker Virtual Iron continues to add to the functionality of its software, and this week launched Version 3.5 of its eponymous product. The big new feature in Version 3.5 is support for iSCSI-based storage arrays, which allow customers to create virtualized server environments without having to spend big bucks on Fibre Channel storage area networks.

Virtual Iron has been selling server virtualization tools for three years now, and started out with its own virtualization hypervisor for carving up a physical server into virtual slices. Unlike other server virtualization products, Virtual Iron's software had a nifty extension that allowed multiple physical servers to be glued together virtually into a giant virtualized server. The software also allows a gang of servers to be sliced and diced on the fly. In April 2006, Virtual Iron dropped its own hypervisor layer and plugged the variant of the open source Xen hypervisor from XenSource into its iron that was based on the AMD-V and VT hardware-assisted virtualization features inside modern X64 chips from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel. By doing so, Virtual Iron could not ride the future--and now current--popularity wave of Xen and make use of the much more efficient AMD-V and VT. The company also removed the requirement to use InfiniBand connect to link physical machines together to be virtualized, and now supports Ethernet was well as InfiniBand.

Up until now, the storage that sits behind virtual server instances in the Virtual Iron environment had to be housed in a Fibre Channel-based storage area network, which is a pretty hefty piece of technology for a lot of customers to invest in. And so Virtual Iron, like rival VMware is supporting the alternative iSCSI method for linking servers to storage behind its virtual machines.

According to Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron, the adoption of iSCSI storage with Version 3.5 is significant since network arrays using iSCSI cost about a tenth the price of Fibre Channel SANs. One of its early adopter customers, The PGA Tour's golfing superstore, has been using a SAN and is now adding machines in an iSCSI environment to save money, says Grandinetti. The LiveMigration, LiveCapacity, LiveMaintenance, and LiveRecovery features of the Virtual Iron suite have been enabled to work on iSCSI, just like they worked on Virtual Iron 3.1 last fall on SANs.

Another change with Virtual Iron 3.5, which was driven by customer demand, is that the Virtualization Manager server that, as the name suggests, manages the virtual machines running on a collection of physical servers, can now be run on one of the boxes in the network of workload machines; up until now, this box had to be a separate machine. Virtual Iron 3.5 also uses LDAP authentication to gain access to the Virtual Iron tools, so IT shops can use the same means to access virtual servers and the Virtual Iron tools as they use to access physical servers and their applications.

With support for iSCSI, Windows as well as Linux support (provided you have a server with Xeon or Opteron processors that have VT or AMD-V features), and a low price of $499 per server socket for Virtual Iron Enterprise Edition, Grandinetti thinks that his company has a good shot at gaining ground in a midmarket that has been grumbling about VMware's high prices.

"From where we stand, VMware is insulting the intelligence of customers," says Grandinetti. "We see the midmarket wanting to take advantage of high availability, business continuity, and utility computing, but up until now, it has not been affordable for them to do so." Grandinetti says that feature for feature--or as much as you can make it given the two different products--Virtual Iron 3.5 costs one-fifth as much as what VMware is charging for its Infrastructure 3 suite of server virtualization products.

As part of the marketing campaign launched last December with Virtual Iron 3.1, which was the first release of the company's tools to support Windows as well as Linux, Virtual Iron launched a freebie version of its product that is limited to one physical machine and a total of 80 virtual servers. According to Grandinetti, the company has seen over 10,000 downloads of the product in three months. While that is not the kind of downloads that VMware has seen with its freebie VMware Server (formerly known as GSX Server), for an upstart server virtualization player as Virtual Iron is, those are pretty good numbers.

RELATED STORIES

XenSource, Virtual Iron Gun for VMware with Features, Low Prices

Virtual Iron Readies Next-Generation Virtualization, Partners with PlateSpin

Novell, Virtual Iron Embed VFe-Capable Kernel into SLES 9

Virtual Iron Standardizes on Xen, Goes Open Source

Virtual Iron Broadens Support with Release 2.0

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot