Virtual Iron Readies Next-Generation Virtualization, Partners with PlateSpin

Published: September 19, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server virtualization software maker Virtual Iron is getting close to launching its Virtual Iron 3.0 software, according to company sources, and is gearing up for that launch by partnering with PlateSpin and creating its own channel partner program.

According to Mike Grandinetti, Virtual Iron's chief marketing officer, Virtual Iron 3.0 has been in beta tests for the past month, and is a matter of "two to three weeks" away from being generally available. The software is currently being put through the paces at 25 "marquee accounts," says Grandinetti, many of them big financial firms who tend to jump in first with any new IT gear.

In April, after a little more than a year of trying to peddle its VFe 2.0 virtualization product, which not only slices up servers into little virtualized pieces but which also can glom servers together into larger virtual instances, Virtual Iron made some dramatic moves for what will be the Virtual Iron 3.0 product set. First, Virtual Iron 3,0 will be based on the Xen Hardware Virtual Machine hypervisor, which is the hypervisor that makes uses of the hardware-assisted virtualization features called VT by Intel and called AMD-V by Advanced Micro Devices. VT and AMD-V are being implemented in the latest generations of Xeon, Itanium, and Opteron processors. Another change that Virtual Iron is making is to remove the requirement for InfiniBand interconnection schemes to make its virtualization software span multiple systems. With Virtual Iron 3.0, customers will be able to use Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, or InfiniBand links between virtualized resources. Finally, Virtual Iron 3.0 is being released under the GNU General Public License.

That open source version will be called Open Virtual Iron 3 for Xen/Community Edition, and it consists of the Xen HVM hypervisor, and a stack of software collectively called Virtualization Services (which provides the virtual storage and networking capability that was formerly in VFe), virtual server resource management, logical partitioning, hot-plug processor and main memory, and LiveMigration partition transportation facilities. Virtual Iron 3 for Xen/Professional Edition will be the compiled version of the stack that is free and that includes support for partitioning and managing a single server. Virtual Iron 3 for Xen/Enterprise Edition will include a closed source Virtualization Manager, which has Web-based tools and policy managers for provisioning and moving around partitions in a Virtual Iron configuration. This latter product is expected to cost $1,500 for a single physical server.

Virtual Iron 3.0 supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. It is supposed to support Microsoft's Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 upon release this month.

In advance of the Virtual Iron 3.0 announcement, the company is partnering with PlateSpin, which has carved out a niche in the systems management market in that its PowerCovert tool can be used to covert physical servers to virtual servers for the price of $120 per conversion. PowerConvert was launched supporting VMware's ESX Server, then was expanded to support Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005, and now it will support Virtual Iron 3.0. By the way, PowerConvert works in reverse, too. It can take a virtual server and convert it to a setup on a single physical server. PlateSpin also sells a product called PowerRecon, which inventories physical resources--CPUs, memory, disk, I/O, and so forth--and helps system administrators figure out what workloads to virtualize first and where best to virtualize them. PowerRecon costs $1 per server per day that it runs on.

Virtual Server also said that it has created a channel program called Channel One, which will give partners sales and marketing support, sales and technical training on Virtual Iron, joint marketing and lead generation, pre- and post-sales technical support, demo software, and dedicated account support from Virtual Iron. For the remainder of this year, Virtual Iron is not charging vendors who want to join its partner program.

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