Virtual Strategy Magazine posted an article on how virtualization is taking costs out of business continuity:

Virtual backup and business continuity solutions enable organizations to improve on the 1-to-1 ratio between primary and backup systems used for traditional disaster recovery and business continuity systems. Because virtual machines can support more users with fewer resources, they provide a practical way for organizations to extend backup protection to more systems – without requiring a corresponding increase in equipment or support. For IT organizations charged to “do more with less,” virtualization is an excellent way to enhance backup and recovery operations.

The article summarizes that "virtualization provides a way to reduce redundancy without reducing reliability. It is a practical way to ensure data, applications and IT resources will be available when needed, without having to pay the premiums of excessive hardware and support."

The full article is here.

David Marshall recorded a podcast on AMD's new roadmap and it is available at InfoWorld. David notes that "AMD has come up with some great designs in the past, and this year expects to be more of the same." The original posting is here and you can download the audio here.

The new AMD chip David discusses is Barcelona, which is a quad-core Opteron.

Windows IT Pro just named Virtual Iron as their Virtualization Editor's Best Choice. We've been working hard to make Virtual Iron the best virtualization solution out there and we're honored to have been awarded this editor's choice.

Here's what Jason Bovberg of Windows IT Pro had to say:

Virtualization is the future of computing, not only for server consolidation but also at the desktop level. If you haven't already begun looking into the technology, you will soon. It's inevitable, whether you're a large corporation looking to tame bloat or a smaller company needing to simplify administration and reduce costs. If you head up a small-to-midsized business (SMB), you've probably turned first toward VMware, probably the most wellknown virtualization platform on the planet. VMware offers all the features you need, but perhaps you've been a bit intimidated by that company's pricing structure. Virtual Iron Software is positioned in the market as a strong VMware competitor—with much of the same functionality at a fraction of the price. Virtual Iron 3.1, my Virtualization Editor's Best choice, the company's enterprise-class virtualization platform, is based on the open-source Xen hypervisor and runs unmodified 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and Linux OSs with near-native performance. Using Virtual Iron's Virtualization Manager, you can control, monitor, modify, and automate virtual resources.

To get a feel for Virtual Iron in the real world, I spoke with Paul Joncas, CEO of Meganet Communications, an ISP/managed services company with 23 employees. Meganet's environment, characterized by many standalone servers, faced mounting space, heat, and power-usage problems. Paul tried various methods to increase efficiency and eventually faced the prospect of virtualization. He told me, "We spoke with three companies, including VMware and Virtual Iron, and we zeroed in on Virtual Iron immediately, for several reasons. First, Virtual Iron offered a lot of the same features as VMware, which was great because we felt that we weren't a big enough fish for VMware. Second, Virtual Iron's pricing was certainly attractive—about $600 or $700, compared with $4000 for VMware—although price wasn't really the determining factor for us. What it really came down to was the eagerness and availability of Virtual Iron's support for even the most minute, seemingly trivial questions. We were about to move into a totally different world, from stand-alone servers to a virtualized environment, so we obviously didn't take this very lightly. Virtual Iron gave us all the attention we needed."

Today, Paul talks enthusiastically about his new streamlined server room: "We're realizing big electricity savings and heat reduction. Over the next six months, we're looking forward to further emptying out our server room and having everything running on the Virtual Iron platform."

Chris Wolf, of the Burton Group, will be hosting a virtualization seminar in Scottsdale, Arizona oin October 4. If you're in the area, I highly recommend taking the time to go. As posted on Chris' site, this seminar will cover everything from virtualization platforms (including, of course, Virtual Iron), methodologies, performance tuning optimization, disaster recovery planning and more. For more information and to register, click here.

LinuxWorld is this week and it'll be interesting to see what news and announcements are made. If you're at the show and come across something interesting, leave a comment here and let me know.

Tomorrow at the show, Mike Grandinetti of Virtual Iron will be moderating the Virtualization and Blades: Complementary or Competitive? panel. Appearing on the panel will be:

• Richard Fichera, Director, BladeSystem Strategy; ISS- Blade System , HP
• Alex Yost, VP Marketing, IBM Blade Center
• Brian C. Harris, CEO, President and Founder, Virtual Ngenuity
• Chris Barclay, Director of Product Management, Virtual Iron

The Next Generation Data Center Conference and Expo is happening alongside LinuxWorld and, naturally, Virtual Iron will be there for a panel. The Data Center Virtualization: What's Real, What's Not panel is being held on Wednesday (August 8) at 11:30am and will include customers sharing their server virtualization stories.

Here's the description:

Speakers: Mike Grandinetti, VP and Chief Marketing Officer, Virtual Iron. Brian C. Harris, CEO, President and Founder, Virtual Ngenuity. Roger Norton. Richard Robinson. Patrick McFadin.

Join a panel of experts, including experienced end-user customers, professional services consultants and technology specialists who will serve to demystify server and storage virtualization, with a specific focus on what technologies are ready for prime time today, which ones are still immature, what benefits that users are truly realizing today, and what we can expect to see in the next twelve months.

Here at Virtual Iron, 2007 has been good to us. We're extremely proud of our software, having added a number of great features (with more to come). We've also announced a number of partnerships but, most importantly to me, we're hearing that a number of companies are happy with us. In fact, as of the end of June, we had over 750 companies actively using Virtual Iron in a variety of environments.

Some of these customers include Owen-Bird law firm, XCalibre Communications, Priceline.com, Hitachi, City of Evanston, City of Gainesville, Toshiba and others.

More on Virtual Iron's first half...

For those looking to run virtualization on a blade, take a look this case study. It's a short, two-page PDF on how the PGA TOUR Superstore is using Virtual Iron and HP BladeSystem. Specifically, they are using 8 ProLiant BL460c G1 server blades along with an HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosure combined with our virtualization software.

Here's the full case study.

I am quoted in the recent issue of Processor magazine:

Alex Vasilevsky, founder and chief technology officer of Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com) says to date, the virtualization of the x86 architecture has been accomplished in two ways: full virtualization and paravirtualization. Vasilevsky says while paravirtualization offers important performance benefits, it also requires modification of the operating system, which may impact application certifications.

Vasilevsky says, “Full virtualization, on the other hand, relies on sophisticated but fragile software techniques to trap and virtualize the execution of certain sensitive, ‘non-virtualizable’ instructions in software via binary patching. With this approach, critical instructions are discovered at run-time and replaced with a trap into the VMM to be emulated in software.” He says while fully functional, these techniques incur large performance overhead (as much as 20 to 40%). This, Vasilevsky says, becomes a problem in the area of system calls, interrupt virtualization, and frequent access to the privileged resources.

The full article can be found here.

There is a recent Interop New article -- "Flying Virtually Under the VMware Price Umbrella" -- about the high cost of VMware and how their pricing allows companies like Virtual Iron to compete.

The article is a great read. I won't quote the full article here but I do like that it includes a bit of Virtual Iron history, a balanced look at what we are doing and a bit on the industry at large.

Mike Grandinetti was interviewed by Jan Stafford of Search Server Virtuatialization about blades and virtualization:

Via the Server Virtualization Blog

Dan Kusnetzky just posted an interview he conducted with Hobson's EMT on why they chose Virtual Iron over other solutions:

What does your organization do that needs what Virtual Iron offers?

Hobson’s has a very tight development cycle. The organization needed to have the ability to test new systems more rapidly. So, creation and provisioning of virtual machines became a requirement. Disaster recovery is the next the logical area for the organization’s focus.

What tangible benefits has your organization gotten from the deployment of Virtual Iron?

The company is quickly able to create and deploy virtual machines. This helps in both development and production environments. The most obvious place they’ve saved money is in the area of staff time. It used to take hours to install a new machine, now the same work can be done in minutes.

Click here for the full interview.

PC World has an article up discussing a recent VMware comment that "the virtual appliance model could be a major threat to operating systems from major vendors such as Microsoft Corp."

The article goes on to discuss VMware and Linux:

"VMware feels at home in the Linux community," said Rosenblum in his keynote address, a remark that one listener described later as "gratuitous."

VMware and Linux...yes, well:

Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer for Virtual Iron Inc., a small virtualization software vendor, says 90 percent of VMware's virtualization runs on Microsoft Windows machines, not Linux. He described Rosenblum's address honoring Linux as "a revisionist view of history."

Virtual Iron's software products are based partly on the open-source Xen kernel for virtualization, which makes them far less expensive than VMware's products, Grandinetti said. XenSource Inc. is another Xen-based virtualization vendor.

Although VMware is the dominant player in the virtualization space, there is still a lot of market to pursue. Only about 2 percent to 3 percent of servers industry-wide are virtualized, less than the 5 percent to 7 percent range forecast by major industry analysts, he said.

"We're just getting started," Grandinetti said.

A good tip from the x86virtualization blog:

Remember each virtual machine is a full computer, and like any desktop probably has a really stupid default screen saver loaded. Check each virtual machine next time your logged in and make sure it is either A) disabled or B) blank screen. Don’t waste your cpu cycles on a marque or bouncing box which no one will ever see.

Full article is here.

There has been lots of buzz about the VMware IPO today...this week...this month. It's overwhelming success really validates the importance of server virtualization and the problems it solves in the data center. It also has generated tremendous awareness and visibility for all the players in the space:

Bullish IPO Hopes for VMware

VMware at $29 A Share; Analyst Warns of IPO Drawbacks

EMC cashes in with VMware IPO

The good news is that VMware has barely scratched the surface. Current market penetration is less than 5% and there is huge opportunity out there, especially in the mid-market. Broad scale adoption by this segment requires a different price/value proposition and we here at Virtual Iron are well positioned for it.

The coming weeks and months should be very interesting times for the entire space.

There has a been a lot of virtualization industry news this week and, hopefully, this wasn't lost in the shuffle of IPOs and such: Virtual Iron Joins Microsoft Interop Vendor Alliance

Microsoft technologies and solutions are deployed in the vast majority of today’s IT infrastructures. By participating in the Interop Vendor Alliance, Virtual Iron will continue to offer and develop server-based virtualization and management solutions that are integrated and interoperable with Microsoft technologies for optimum performance. Products are tested in a multi-vendor environment, making it easier to ensure interoperability. Joining the alliance will also allow Virtual Iron to publish joint evidence on how Virtual Iron and Microsoft are addressing interoperability.

“Virtual Iron is an important addition to the Interop Vendor Alliance,” said David Greschler, director of integrated virtualization strategy for Microsoft. “Tighter integration with Microsoft technologies will provide our mutual customers with highly reliable and easy to implement solutions for server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management in their environments.”

Read the full press release here.

There are many people who are really hearing about virtualizaton for the first time this week (or, at least, taking a closer look). If you're just starting to take a look, it would be a good idea to try some virtualization for free.

You can do that right here -- simply register and click submit and you'll receive a license key for our Single Server Edition. You can virtualize up to 12 virtual machines absolutely free and get an excellent idea why the concept of virtualization is really taking off.

Here's how you can setup a non-default VHD repository in Virtual Iron. Note that you should be using Virtual Iron 3.7.4 for this to work (if you're not on the latest version, you can download it here).

The VHD repository path is specified by setting the local variable defaultVHDRepositoryPath in etc/vdi.properties to the directory the user wants to use as the VHD repository, and then restarting the management server. On Linux the directory will be created, if it doesn't already exist. On Windows the directory must exist and be shared already. In addition both share and directory permissions must be set to Everyone-Full Control.

If an invalid directory is specified, or if the directory can't be created, an error is logged, and the directory will remain set to the last valid directory set.

For Linux management servers, specifying a directory is straight forward and Linux naming rules and directory separator characters apply. For example, to set the repository to the directory /opt/storage/vdisks:

defaultVHDRepositoryPath = "/opt/storage/vdisks"

For Windows management servers, windows-specific UNC syntax is required. This consists of four "\" characters ("\\\\"), followed by the machine name(not IP Address) and the path. Subdirectories in the path are specified with 2 "\" characters ("\\"). For example, to set the VHD repository to the directory VHD Repository on machine NASStorage"

defaultVHDRepositoryPath = "\\\\NASStorage\\VHD Repository"

From the forums:

As I'm reviewing VI due to it's reduced cost over ESX, my budget is somewhat limited (and it's my personal money this time, not my company's), therefore if anyone has a fewpointers on creating inexpensive yet quality iSCSI based SAN solutions suitable for VI, then I would be extremely grateful.

Most iSCSI SANs begin at $3000-$4000 but I'm looking to reduce this to $1000-$1500 for the following:

1U
SATA II 500GB (total), expandable to a min of 4 x SATA II
RAID 5 hardware inc batt
3000 series processor (negotiable) x 2
Redundant PSU
x2 1Gb/s Ethernet
Motherboard: Tyan/Supermicro ??

OS - I've considered running Open-E iSCSI SMB to reduce the OS cost

Any pointers most welcome.

Read the full thread and offer your suggestions here.

David Marshall's virtualization podcast this week features recent Virtual Iron announcements from the past few weeks, including:

- Our Microsoft Interop Vendor Alliance announcment
- Virtual Iron's great first half of 2007
- Significant growth in our partner ecosystem

David also notes that, due to our price point and great feature set, we are the "VMware alternative choice for a growing number of companies."

Here's the podcast (MP3), which plays for about 5 minutes

In this article -- Virtualization: Even Little Guys Ride the Wave -- Virtual Iron is the "little guy." Why? Quite simply, the article discusses how the VMware IPO and Citrix acquisition of XenSource has been good for us.

John Thibault, Virtual Iron's CEO, was interviewed for this story and says:

"Even with all their rapid growth (VMware has) only penetrated 5 percent of the server market," Thibault said. "We are uniquely positioned in one of the fastest-growing, hottest technology spaces in the industry today. We have the opportunity to grow a very large and valuable company."

Full article here.

Virtual Iron is supported in PlateSpin PowerRecon 2.5 and PowerConvert 6.5.

The conversion process can be done in just seven steps:

1. Creating an empty virtual server on Virtual Iron
2. Booting the virtual server using PlateSpin Boot CD (ISO file or physical CD)
3. Registering the virtual server with a PowerConvert Server
4. Discovering the source (physical) server
5. Drag and drop the source on top of the Target virtual server
6. Configure and execute the job
7. Install VSTools after the migration

Discuss this in our forums.

VMworld is in just a couple of weeks. Virtual Iron will be there (booth #313). Will you?

As you deploy Virtual Iron in production environments, you may want to plan for failure scenarios. Virtual Iron virtual infrastructure is built with availability in mind. The virtualization layer is small -- just the bare minimum components necessary to create virtual infrastructure. The Virtualization Manager that controls virtual infrastructure can be made highly available.

In the event that the Virtualization Manager is unavailable, the virtual infrastructure continues to run. This means there is no interruption of service for any of the virtual machines in your environment.

To decrease the time the Virtualization Manager can be offline, we recommend using Active/Passive clustering technology.

The full article in our forums describe how to configure your environment in 9 easy steps.

Earlier today, we announced that Virtual Iron has certified LeftHand Networks’ open iSCSI storage area network software. From the release:

By deploying LeftHand Networks’ SAN/iQ open iSCSI SAN with Virtual Iron virtualization and management software, users gain a simple, flexible and cost-effective virtual server and storage infrastructure that easily adapts to changing business needs. The combined capabilities deliver immediate improvements in resource utilization, simplified patch management, back up and disaster recovery for more cost-effective capacity management.

Full article here.

We have many of our past webcasts available for download and viewing in our webcast archive.

If you've missed a webcast or are just learning about virtualization or Virtual Iron, I'd recommend looking at one of the Virtual Iron demos or downloader webcasts. Other webcasts focus on more specific information, such as virtual appliances or decreasing power and cooling costs.