Virtual Iron Expands Linux Support with Release 4.2

Published: December 11, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server virtualization software maker Virtual Iron is keeping up its steady drumbeat of software releases, and this week puts Version 4.2 of its eponymous product set out to market.

Most importantly for customers who are on the leading edge of commercial Linuxes, Virtual Iron Version 4.2 will support the latest Linuxes from Red Hat and Novell, which means Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 (from March 2007) and 5.1 (from November 2007) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (from July 2006) and SLES 10 SP1 (from June 2007), respectively. Starting with Virtual Iron 4.0, which was launched in September of this year, the server hypervisor itself was booting on bare iron using the SLES 10 SP1 kernel and drivers. But this is not the same thing as supporting SLES 10 SP1 as a guest operating system, fully tested and certified. (VMware's ESX Server 3.0 hypervisor uses a cut-down RHEL kernel for this purpose, and Citrix Systems' Xen Server hypervisor uses a variant of Debian Linux to boost on bare iron as well.)

Version 4.2 of the Virtual Iron server virtualization software, which has been based on the open source Xen hypervisor since April 2006, has also been updated with multipathing support for Ethernet network links and Fibre Channel storage area network links, which allows virtual machines and physical networks and storage to be cross-coupled with multiple paths between each other, improving the resiliency of the resulting setup. The updated software also includes a new LiveSnapshot feature, which can take a snapshot of a live partition and archive it; up until now, Virtual Iron could clone a software stack running on the hypervisor in a guest partition, but the software in the partition had to be quiesced before than clone could be made. Disk support is also being tweaked in the new release. Prior Virtual Iron releases could do dynamic load balancing across disk arrays, but now customers can add a disk drive to a disk group and dynamically add it to an existing virtual drive.

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