A new Virtual Iron features page was added to our website earlier today.

This page provides a very nice overview of the features you will find in Virtual Iron, such as LiveMigrate, automatic deployment, reporting features and virtual server cloning, along with some links to more information and screenshots/graphics.

Go to the Virtual Iron Features Page

This Thursday, we are presenting a webcast demo of Virtual Iron 3.7, which was just released. You can register for the webcast here and read more about the Virtual Iron 3.7 release here.

The big news in version 3.7 is that Virtual Iron now supports logical disks. From the announcement:

Logical disks have been used for some time in the physical world, but Virtual Iron is the first to offer this capability in a virtual infrastructure environment. With Virtual Iron 3.7, users can now configure their virtual servers to access two types of disks:

- Logical disks - High-performance disks that can be assigned to one or more virtual servers. The size can be smaller than the underlying physical disk, allowing the under-lying disk to be partitioned amongst multiple virtual servers. They can be supported on Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and local storage.

- Raw SAN disks - Offer the best performance. They are used when one or more virtual servers use one entire physical LUN.

Our flash demo has been updated to reflect the latest version. You can watch it here.

CRN has posted ten tips for deploying virtualization, including:

"2. Don't try to resurrect older servers stuffed in a corner. Virtualization on the x86 platform was enabled by the availability of more powerful VT-enabled processors and requires powerful processors plus lots of memory and disk space."

and

"8. Clean up before virtualizing. Use Windows Update and get current hardware drivers to be as up-to-date as possible, delete unused applications and remove inappropriate applications from the tray. Instant messaging, for example, isn't good candidate for virtualization. Dump or store what's in the recycle bin, and remove unneeded applications from the startup menu to enhance performance. Also, back up data to physical servers for quick access to historical archives."

CRN, by the way, just named us a "vendor you should know".

I'll be speaking at the Virtualization Conference in New York later this month about the New Economics of Virtualization. Here's the description:

Companies are finding it increasingly difficult to manage their enterprise data centers. They're highly complex, expensive to build out, and difficult to reconfigure. The net result is a high cost of ownership for a resource that is poorly positioned to meet the needs of businesses. Enter in server virtualization - the benefits of which are well documented, but there has been poor adoption to date due to cost and complexity. This session will explore the latest industry standards and open source technologies that are helping to open up the benefits of virtualization to a new segment of the market - enabling users to expand their virtualization initiatives.

More info

Among the many industries finding virtualization to be a cost and time saver, hosted service providers are at the top of the list for a number of reasons -- such as needing to offer a variety of IT environments to a large group of customers.

You can read more about how virtualization is saving costs in this area on our virtualization for hosted service providers page.

For some more specific details on how virtualization is helping, see our XCalibre Communications story or Meganet Communications press release.

The Mainframe Weekly Blog has a post up about virtualization geared towards virtualization beginner's. If you're looking for a brief overview, check it out.

If you are new to virtualization, the best way to learn more is to download Virtual Iron for free and try it out for yourself.

We've just posted a new technical white paper, which you can find on our home page.

Virtual Iron's Product Manager, Chris Barclay, posted information on virtual server timekeeping.

The article discusses how to keep the clock in a virtual server and the clock in physical hardware in sync. Chris explains that time sharing is different in a virtualized environment, specifically because timer interrupts sent to an OS may not be received by a virtual server not running at the time of the interrupt.

Read the full article: Virtual Server Timekeeping

An interesting question on the forums: Can Virtual Iron's virtualization manager be virtualized?

The short answer is yes, you can easily virtualize our virtualization manager. You do need two virtualization managers to get this to work (but one can be our free single server edition).

More detail in snoyes response: "It's been done, but you'll need 2 Virtualization Managers. One can be a Single Server Edition (SSE) system which has a self-contained Virtualization Manager. In that SSE system, you can create a Virtual Server where you can then install a copy of the Enterprise Edition Virtualization Manager which could support physical nodes external to the SSE system. That may or may not be helpful to you, depending on what you're trying to accomplish. We use that configuration as part of our internal testing."

Thanks to Eric Roch, I just found out that Wiley has a Virtualization for Dummies book (not sure if it's out now or is coming out later this year).

According to the Wiley website, the book has 5 parts:
- Getting Started with a Virtualization Project
- Server Virtualization
- Server Virtualization Software Options
- Storage Virtualization
- The Part of Tens

Click here for more info on Wiley's website

Here's a tip from ComputerWeekly that I found via David Marshall's blog:

There's a lot of confusion around file virtualisation, and virtualisation in general, because the term virtualisation can mean so many different things.

But, when we talk about file virtualisation, the focus is on file-level activities rather than block- (storage) level activities, like what you'd have in a Fibre Channel, iSCSI or direct-attached storage. But, we can break it down even further into three main areas: abstraction, emulation and aggregation. Abstraction refers to things like data movement, migration or copying. Emulation lets other devices seamlessly integrate with other applications or platforms. Aggregation lets one device sit in front of and combine multiple data streams or features.

Continued here

We offer two versions of Virtual Iron: a single server version and an enterprise edition and we're often asked what the differences are between the two versions. The easiest way to compare these two versions is in this new comparison chart that our web team posted.

Both versions are, of course, available for free download. The version you should download depends on what your environment is and what stage of a virtualization implementation you are at.

Click here for the comparison chart.

We have a number of webcasts coming up next week:

Combining Server and Storage Virtualization to Reduce Data Center Cost and Complexity

Virtual Iron Installation Demo

Webcast: Get All the Capabilities of VMware - At 1/5th the Price

Register for one or all...they're free. If you can't attend, we should have recordings of these webcasts available a day or so after they occur.

From InfoStor:

While cost control is paramount for every business, a bad technology acquisition can be much more detrimental for an SMB than for a large enterprise. Therefore, SMBs are necessarily cautious. Many SMBs believe SANs cost too much and are too complex. But what if a SAN could actually reduce your storage costs and ease the strain on your IT resources? With the advent of iSCSI and IP SANs, which are less expensive and easier to manage than Fibre Channel networks, SMBs should consider a SAN if they are faced with data growth and increasing storage-management concerns. And most SMBs are facing these issues.

...

James Santillo, systems administrator for The Weiss Group, has been working with SANs for about seven years and was involved in several conversions from DAS to SAN before he joined the company a couple of years ago.

...

The entire project will take about four months, and Santillo is about halfway through. Contributing to the length of the project is Santillo's decision to turn a $300,000 project into a $125,000 one by leveraging lower costs of emerging technology. For example, Santillo decided to use Virtual Iron, which is based on open source, as an alternative to VMware.

Full article here.

Just a reminder that I'll be speaking tomorrow at the Virtualization Conference and Expo in New York. If you're in the area, stop by. My session in scheduled to start at 3:15.

More info on the confrerence can be found here.

If you're not able to attend, check back here. I'll try to post my slides later this week.

Dan Kusnetzky, author of ZDNet's Virtually Speaking blog and always an entertaining read, posted on the Golden Rules of IT.

My favorite:

Don't touch it, you'll break it. Most organizations of any size are using a complex mix of systems that were developed over several decades. Changing working systems that are based upon older technologies, older architectures and older methodologies has to be done very carefully if the intended results and only the intended results are to be achieve.

Of course, you will never be able to avoid updating old systems. Thankfully, you can use virtualization to keep those legacy systems alive "inside" your new servers when you do upgrade.

The recording for our most recent webcast, which we co-hosted with Compellent, is now available. You can watch it here:

Combining Server and Storage Virtualization to Reduce Data Center Cost and Complexity

The description of this webcast is:

Server and storage virtualization attack the same fundamental challenge - improving resource utilization and optimizing data center resources so that they can be readily deployed when and where they are needed. These solutions are especially powerful when used in combination with virtual infrastructure management, where administrators can use business-driven policies to deliver computing resources automatically based on priority, cost and service level.

We are launching a Virtual Iron 4.0 beta program. If you are interested in testing the Virtual Iron 4.0 beta, please register here.

All registrations will be reviewed and followed up on with additional information.