Virtual Iron Broadens Support with Release 2.0

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Linux server virtualization software vendor Virtual Iron yesterday announced it has put out a second release of its VFe software suite for aggregating and carving up server capacity across a network of X86 and X64 servers. By getting Virtual Iron VFe 2.0 into the field before the end of the year, the upstart virtualization software vendor is making good on the promises it made at its company launch in late January.

Virtual Iron, which was formerly known as Katana Technology during its product development stage, launched itself with great fanfare at LinuxWorld earlier this year in Boston and bragged that it was the first virtualization software maker that could gang up individual servers into a single virtual machine as well as carve up a single physical machine into many virtual machines. The partitions in a Virtual Iron machine configuration can span from one-sixteenth of a processor core to 16 processor cores spread across many servers. The combined total number of virtual machines that the VFe hypervisor can manage is 128 partitions. The Virtual Iron VFe software doesn't just virtualize processor partitions, of course, and it also has built-in SAN and network virtualization technologies, too. For a true virtualized infrastructure, you need to virtualize processor, memory, and I/O, which is why VFe does all three.

With release 1.0 of the VFe software, Virtual Iron supported 32-bit Linux running on 32-bit X86 servers, and used InfiniBand interconnect as the backbone to link multiple, independent servers into a single Linux image. Both Red Hat and Novell Linux distros were supported with VFe. The product was initially expected to be generally available in May, but actually started shipping at the end of July, according to Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron, who was hired during the summer.

In August, Virtual Iron announced that it would allow its VFe software to manage partitions created by the open source Xen hypervisor, and it seems likely that eventually VFe will be extended (with or without the cooperation of VMware) to allow the management of partitions created by GSX Server and ESX Server, too. That's not a statement of direction from Virtual Iron, but rather a good guess. Why would Virtual Iron do this? It is simple. It won't be too long before the virtual machine hypervisor layer is just another commodity, and the key differentiator between these various virtualization technologies will be how they can manage various kinds of VMs. The management tool that can deal with the most hypervisors and provide enterprise-class technical support will win.

So Virtual Iron has been building its war chest to expand the VFe product and pump up its marketing efforts. In late September, Virtual Iron announced that it had completed its third round of venture capital funding, raising $8.5 million with an option to raise another $2 million from the round. Intel's venture capital arm was the lead investor, with Goldman Sachs, Highland Capital Partners, and Matrix Partners all ponying up some dough. The latter three had already put $20 million in capital into Virtual Iron in its first two rounds of venture infusions.

With yesterday's announcement, Virtual Iron is now supporting the Opteron processor from Advanced Micro Devices, including both single- and dual-core processors. Because Virtual Iron counts processor cores, not sockets, the VFe software only scales to 16 cores in a virtual machine, so don't think that by moving to dual-core Opterons you can double the scalability of the VFe software. With Version 2.0, VFe also supports IBM's BladeCenter blade servers, which are the shipment leader right now in the blade server market. Grandinetti says that, being a small company, Virtual Iron has not yet certified VFe on Hewlett-Packard's BladeSystem blade servers, but the software is certified to run on the ProLiant server line from HP, the xSeries server line from IBM, and the PowerEdge server line from Dell. Grandinetti added that support for Sun's "Galaxy" Opteron-based servers was coming down the road and that the ProLiant blade servers would probably get certified soon, too.

With the Series C funding led by Intel, Virtual Iron got more than money. It also now has a collaborative engineering agreement to work on support for "Vanderpool Technology," or VT, which is the instruction set virtualization electronics that will be added to Xeon and Itanium processors in 2006 to speed up and make consistent CPU virtualization across all kinds of virtual machine hypervisors. Grandinetti says that because Virtual Iron needs to be agnostic about X64 processors--since the server market is--VFe will eventually support the similar "Pacifica" instruction set virtualization electronics inside the Opteron line of processors as well, which are expected with the Opteron Rev F processors some time next year.

Virtual Iron has said in the past that it will eventually offer a version of the VFe platform that will support Microsoft's Windows server platform. And Grandinetti confirmed that Virtual Iron is still committed to that goal and hopes to have product ready to support Windows by mid-2006 or so. As for supporting X64-based Unixes such as the BSDs or Solaris, those are clearly options, but being a startup, Virtual Iron is concentrating on Linux first, then Windows, then making a lot of money, and then taking on other operating systems after that. While Virtual Iron will support Windows partitions, it remains to be seen if VFe will be extended to support virtual machines created by Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005.

Virtual Iron's VFe hypervisor and related software stack is sold in 32-core bundles that have a list price of $50,000. With 64-core and 128-core licensing, Grandinetti says that the price of the Virtual Iron software can go down to about $1,000 per core.

This is significantly less expensive than VMware's ESX Server, which is the touchstone product for X86 virtual machine partitioning. The complete bundle of ESX Server products costs around $5,000 per processor socket, and on dual-core machines, that makes it 2.5 times as expensive as Virtual Iron. However, ESX Server supports Linux, Windows, NetWare, and now Solaris and creates virtual machines that can also be hosted on the desktop Workstation and less-robust GSX Server platforms, too. A VMware VM can run on any VMware-supported platform, and that has real value. Virtual Iron has a long way to go before it can match the coverage of ESX Server, but by keeping its prices reasonably low and aiming at large enterprises who are early adopters for Linux and virtualization--the two are a relatively small but lucrative set of customers--Virtual Iron has a good chance of making some money. In addition to building out it hardware and operating system coverage, Virtual Iron needs to build out its reseller channel--something Grandinetti is well aware of and working on.