Virtualization.info has a great post up about virtualization trends of 2006.

It's a nice summary of how virtualization has really exploded in 2006 and looks forward a bit into 2007.

Techworld has a story up about the big trends coming up in 2007 and, of course, virtualization is one of them.

They say:

"The virtualisation software market could start to develop from a one-horse race into a multi-player field. [...] the entry of players such as Virtual Iron and others could well start to see VMware's almost impregnable position start to become eroded."

Click here for the full article.

Since we launched Virtual Iron 3.1 last month, we've seen a ton of downloads. Everybody is glad to finally see a viable alternative to VMware and, hey, if it's free, even better.

I was curious what the downloads amounted to, so I did a few calculations. If everybody who downloaded Virtual Iron 3.1 had purchased VMware instead, then $100 million dollars would have been wasted. Since Virtual Iron 3.1 Enterprise has features comparable to VMware's ESX Server and Virtual Center, it's certainly an easy choice to take free -- and, collectively, $100 million dollars have been saved. You're welcome :-)

As I promised last year, here is a series of articles that explain in greater detail the virtual infrastructure elements with which you can build virtual datacenters using Virtual Iron.

The virtual infrastructure consists of these elements:

Computing resources: Virtual representation of memory, CPU and other resources of a physical server.

Storage resources: Virtual Volumes are abstracted combinations of physical storage in the datacenter.

Network resources: Virtual networks that connect virtual machines to each other and to physical networks.

Virtual machines (or virtual servers): Utilizes the above resources and, when active, runs an instance of a guest OS.

Storage resources are essentially virtual volumes -- an abstract combination of physical storage resources in the datacenter. These resources can come from Directly Attached Storage (DAS) disks and from Storage Area Network (FC SAN or iSCSI SAN) disks or be a combination of both. Virtual Volume Management gives you a simple and easily understood model for allocating your storage.

All devices are transparent to the guest operating systems and are represented as SCSI disks connected to a virtual BUS or as IDE disks through an emulated Intel controller. This hides the complexity of managing physical storage. The particular storage type (FC SAN, DAS SCSI, DAS SAS, iSCSI) is completely transparent to the guests.

Your network resources are your virtual networks, which connect virtual machines to each other or to physical networks outside of your virtual datacenter, as shown in the graphic below. The virtual machine can run isolated or with up to 8 virtual NICs per virtual machine.

The infrastructure includes a virtual ethernet switch, allowing you to connect virtual machines to external connectivity or to connect a virtual machine to other virtual machines.

You can also have up to 8 physical NICs on a physical server.

Part 1 of this series covers computing resources and part 2 covers storage resources. The fourth and final article will be available later today.

Look at some of the basic and advanced things you can do with this complete virtual infrastructure:

- Server Consolidation: Improve utilization of your current systems through partitioning and consolidation. You can run unmodified guest operating systems concurrently on a single server.

- Rapid Provisioning: Fast, easy set up of development, testing, staging and production environments.

- Business Continuity: Implement high availability and disaster recovery with fewer resources.

- Capacity Management: Align your computing resources with your business initiatives through configuration and resource allocation.

- LiveMigrate: Move a running virtual machine from one physical server to another, with no downtime.

- LiveCapacity: Schedule across a shared pool of resources; continuously sample performance data from each and every server and virtual machine in the virtual datacenter; automatically make policy driven scheduling decisions; works with LiveMigrate to continuously optimize your virtual datacenter; reacts to addition or removal of servers from the virtual datacenter.

- LiveRecovery: Gives you high availability for all of your servers.

That's the power of virtual infrastructure! Parts 1 to 3 are also available:

Part 1: Computing Resources
Part 2: Storage Resources
Part 3: Network Resources

Server virtualization is probably "the" hottest market today. If it's so great, then why aren't more servers getting virtualized? It has been widely reported by Gartner, IDC and many other analysts that virtualization software attach rates are hovering at only 1% and the cumulative installed base is near 5%.

Is consumption of this technology being artificially stifled by the dominant player (VMware) in the marketplace? Is the dominant player's software priced too high and performance too low? We definitely think so! When the software costs more than the server and runs much slower than the physical hardware, there won't be many servers and applications getting virtualized.

At Virtual Iron, we decided to do things differently: we decided to use advance hardware-assisted virtualization technology from Intel and AMD (the performance part I mentioned), coupled with rapid innovation that utilizes open source development methodology and an aggressive business model (this is the price part) to deliver "virtualization for the rest of us."

In Virtual Iron 3.1, you have three options to backup your virtual servers:

1. Use the guest operating system's standard backup software.

2. If you don't mind a very short outage, you can shut down the guest and simply clone the virtual hard disk. This is scriptable and takes just a few minutes per guest, so your outage would be very small.

Recently, we got some new hardware that came without physical CDs. A perfect machine to use for virtual infrastructure but how does one install software from a CD into the virtual machines running on these servers?

Well, on Virtual Iron it is pretty straightforward. In the Virtualization Manager we have an image repository that acts as a block device over a network - and we use this technology to create a cool virtual CD-ROM accessible from a network. Here is how to use it:

Dynamically Manage Resources with LiveCapacity

Virtual Iron provides a comprehensive management environment and policy-engine to automate the management of shared processing, storage and networking resources. Resources can be allocated and de-allocated on the fly to applications when needed based on business rules. The unique policy-driven automation capabilities enable rapid reconfiguration, capacity on demand, failover and recovery without any increased administrative overhead. Virtual Iron's management capabilities enable users to:

Virtual Iron was recently selected by two major publications as a company to keep an eye on in 2007:

- Network Computing named us a "company to watch" in their 2007 Survivor's Guide.

- InformationWeek call us a "Notable Newcomer" in a sidebar to their How Virtualization is Revolutionizing Business Data Centers article (which also features our customer, The Charlotte Observer).

It is very easy to use a USB device with your virtual server. Using this product from FabulaTech, I was able to turn my laptop into a USB server and share a USB memory stick with a Virtual Server:

In order to do this, you will need to load both the client (on the virtual server) and the server (on my laptop) software. The result is USB connectivity for virtual servers that even allows you to LiveMigrate while preserving the USB connectivity. Pretty cool.

If you're using Virtual Iron 3.1, take a look at the new support page posted to our web site today. It's one-stop shopping for all your Virtual Iron product questions.

Virtual Iron has just launched the Virtual Appliance Exchange over on our forums.

Running a Virtual Appliace on Virtual Iron is very easy:

1. Download a virtual appliance
2. Copy the VHD file into the vdisks directory
3. Open and start the Virtualization Manager
4. Creat a logical volume for the virtual appliace and import the VHD
5. Follow the instructions for the virtual appliance

For full details, click here.

To get things started, a CentOS 4.4 Virtual Appliance is available.

How many physical servers do you have? 100? 1,000? More? If you're thinking about virtualization, then you've probably wondered how to go about converting all of those physical machines to virtual servers. You've also probably thought that it will be time-consuming and expensive. Well, it can be, but it doesn't have to be.

There are a bunch of automated physical-to-virtual conversion tools out there and most work well with Virtual Iron. PlateSpin PowerConvert, for example, will automatically migrate your data, applications and operating systems from physical servers to Virtual Iron's virtual infrastructure. Another option is Invirtus, uses a "snapshot-based cloning technology" in their Enterprise VM Converter to make this process seamless.

Next Thursday (January 25), John Humphreys from IDC and Mike Grandinetti from Virtual Iron will be presenting the Virtualization 2.0 webcast. This is a free webcast, so please join us -- you can register here.

Here is the description I was given for this event:

Server virtualization has quickly become a key area of investment for IT organizations worldwide. Its well-documented benefits involve minimal risk and provide a rapid payback. The clear return on investment combined with a broadening set of virtualization use cases has created the potential for mainstream customer adoption. This webcast will look at some of the emerging solutions that are fundamentally changing the economics of virtualization - facilitating dramatic gains in price performance and enabling the benefits of virtualization for a whole new set of users and business applications.

I expect we'll reach our registration limit quickly, so be sure to register early if you want to attend.

We recently signed a partnership agreement with Citrix to get their Dynamic Desktop Initiative and the Virtual Iron platform working together. Citrix is the number one ISV application to get virtualized. Take a look at this video. It shows us:

- Running Citrix Presentation Server on Windows Server 2003 inside of a virtual machine
- On top of that virtual machine, we are also running Citrix Desktop Broker
- Inside of another virtual machine, we are running an unmodified copy of Windows XP (the virtual desktop that you'll be accessing remotely)
- We are able to access all of this through another client, which also happens to be running inside of a virtual machine

Click here for the video.

Every Friday, I will answer questions that you have here in the blog. If you have a question, you can either let me know by leaving a comment or posting in our forums (it's a good idea to post in the forums, because someone else may know the answer to your question and you will probably get a faster response).

This week's question comes from the forums:

I have been a VMware admin for years and am thinking of making a push to switch over to VirtualIron. My main question right now (without installing anything), is there any form of remote administration to the Management console like there is in VirtualCenter's client?

When we announced Virtual Iron 3.1's release last month, we knew the market would be interested in a virtualization solution with comparable features to VMware that costs just $499 per socket. Price has been a real obstacle for those who want to virtualize and we felt strongly that our virtualization software shouldn't cost more than the servers they run on. We're not the only ones who feel this way. We've done extensive primary research with both end users and resellers (not to mention IDC, Gartner and others have been saying this for years).

I want to emphasize that our pricing is $499 per socket. We're not hiding additional costs in the fine print and we're not trying to fool you with pricing games. As a founder, you have my word that Virtual Iron will not:

- Oversell you on memory features that ostensibly provide extra virtual servers. We all know this degrades performance and there's little value in that.
- Require you to purchase before seeing our software in action. Our software is available for free download at any time.

Microsoft has a virtualization calculator up to help you estimate the number and cost of Windows Server 2003 licenses you'll need in a virtualized datacenter. You can calculate by socket or processor.

Click here for the calculator.

Thanks to DABCC for pointing this out.

If you haven't signed up for our webcast with IDC yet, there is still some room.

For details on this webcast, see my posting from last week.

I have also found out that a recording of the webcast will be available to everybody who registers. If you can't attend but are still interested, sign up and we will notify you when the recording is available.

Earlier today, we announced that we have teamed up with rPath to offer ready-to-run virtual appliances. Network World has an article on this and you can also read our press release.

As of now, 10 virtual appliances are available at http://www.rpath.com/virtualiron, including:
- LAMP appliance
- Port25 Mail Server
- Apache Appliance

David Marshall, of VMblog, has written a fantastic article that's posted on Virtual-Strategy's web site.

The article, Virtualization Wars: The Past, Present and Future of Virtualization, covers many topics from virtualization's beginnings to recent changes in pricing and more.

Here's an excerpt from first page of the article:

Virtualization is one of those buzzwords that is being freely floated around the industry left and right, and can mean so many different things to so many different people. Lately, virtualization has been getting a lot of press coverage, and industry analysts are telling business organizations that this is a "must have" technology. It's even been said that if you haven't already at least started to look at how virtualization can be used within your company, you're probably already falling behind.

Check out the full article.

One of the questions we were asked after our recent webcast with IDC (recorded version coming soon) was what our thoughts were on what virtualization benchmarks should be used and when these metrics would be released.

It's a great question and we strongly believe that virtualization performance depends on the application characteristics (for example, CPU, disk, and ethernet IO).

Currently, there are two benchmarks being developed by the industry - one by VMware and the other by Intel. You have to carefully look at what the benchmark measures to determine its applicability to your task. Both VMware and Intel are using a blend of many benchmarks to approximate a "standard" consolidation environment and are being submitted to Spec.org. We expect they will be in committee for some time.

Back on January 17th, my colleague Chris Barclay hosted a webinar for everybody who has been using Virtual Iron 3.1 Coming out of this webinar were a lot of good questions, which Chris has answered and posted to the forums.

Chris answered 18 questions in lightning-round fashion. A few highlights:

Will live migrate (like VMware's vmotion) support dynamic reallocation of virtual servers based on predefined performance requirements?
Yes. We have both LiveMigration (live relocation of virtual servers), and LiveCapacity (automated LiveMigration based on predefined performance requirements.