Virtual Iron's CEO John Thibault was recently interviewed about the company, the virtualization market and VMware's IPO. The full interview is here.

When asked how Virtual Iron differs from VMware and others in the marketing, John notes:

"Price and complexity are the two most significant obstacles to future adoption of server virtualization according to Gartner and IDC. Virtual Iron is focused on minimizing both to bring all the value of virtualization to the mainstream market. We're focused on delivering a highly reliable, cost-effective and easy to deploy platform that everyone can use. Price is attractive to users (we're a fraction of the cost of VMware for comparable capabilities), but the product absolutely has to meet their needs. Price is irrelevant otherwise.

"Complexity is also a big issue for users, especially in the small/midsize enterprise market. Virtual Iron has some unique capabilities that really simplify installation and deployment and make it much easier for users to leverage server virtualization to support some of the more advanced use cases (and bigger ROI) such as business continuity, disaster recovery and capacity management."

His take on the VMware IPO is also included in the interview:

"Fortunately for everyone in the industry, including users, the VMware IPO has brought broad attention to the promise of server virtualization and the problems it tackles. At the same time, advances in industry standards, open source and new 'built-in' virtualization capabilities in the latest Intel and AMD processors are converging to enable new, lower cost, easier-to-use alternatives. With these advantages, Virtual Iron is turning the economics of virtualization on its head and opening up all of the significant benefits of virtualization to the mainstream market."

Click here for the rest of the interview.

Virtual Iron 4 was announced today. With this new release, there are three flavors of Virtual Iron:

Here is what's new in version 4:

- P2V and V2V migrations
- Novell SLES 10 kernel
- Expanded hardware certification and support
- More OS support (both 32 and 64 bit)
- Support for Windows SMP

For more on version 4, click here.

The coverage on our new release has been starting to pour in:

eWEEK: Virtual Iron Preps Latest Virtualization Release
SearchServerVirtualization: Virtual Iron's v4 takes on VMware, XenSource
ZDNet: A Quick Look at Virtual Iron V 4
Enterprise IT Planet: Virtual Iron Hits 4.0
ServerWatch: Virtually Speaking: Virtual Iron Forges Ahead
Ars Technica: Virtual Iron Goes 4.0

Intel has released a performance report for Virtual Iron using their vConsolidate Benchmark. The bottom line is that Intel ran its test against Virtual Iron 4.0 and the results show remarkable improvement: a 167% increase in virtualization performance.

You can see the full results in this PDF.

Intel has officially announced their Quad-Core series, which features some virtualization improvements on the chip level (see here).

As I noted yesterday, Virtual Iron performs exceptionally well on Intel's Quad-Core series.

As part of the launch, Intel and Virtual Iron have produced a video, which you can see here.

Our online demo has been updated for Virtual Iron 4. Click here to watch it.

New features in Virtual Iron 4 include:

- Expanded 32 and 64 bit OS support (see the full list)
- Commercially supported Novell kernel and drivers (see the press release)
- Streamlined virtual infrastructure management
- Bundled P2V and V2V powered by PlateSpin
- Expanded hardware certification and support (list)
- Windows SMP support; up to 8 vCPUs

Virtual Iron 4 is available for download. You can request your free trial download here.

Information Week has an article up about our new version 4: Virtual Iron Weighs In As Low-Priced Virtualization Alternative

"We have LiveMigrate. We have LiveRecovery. We have the equivalent of Virtual Center," said Grandinetti, citing his firm's alternative to VMotion and other features in VMware's virtual machine management system, Virtual Center.

The new features are part of Virtual Iron Version 4. LiveMigrate allows moving virtual machines from one physical server to another without interupting the user. LiveRecovery monitors virtual machines and moves them to another server if a piece of hardware fails. LiveProvisioning is the automated deployment of virtual machines on servers that have hypervisors already installed.

This post from Travis Broughton gave me a good laugh:

Recently, a colleague and I spoke to a group of IT administrators in Washington, DC. We left our car in a self-park parking lot in which the attendants had everyone leave their keys in their car, in lieu of keeping them on a valet "key board". They seemed to be depending on reasonably honest customers (we were in a secure area past a government checkpoint) and their own memories to ensure no cars were "lost". We returned to find that the parking lot attendants had completely rearranged the vehicles. Since it was a rental car, it was hard to describe the car and therefore hard to find. (By this point you're probably thinking that I've posted to the wrong board or that Intel pays me by the word, but bear with me)

It took a rather lengthy iterative search, but we eventually found the car. As we walked, my colleague and I joked about this as "parking lot virtualization". Our vehicle was moved from one slot to another to better fulfill the changing needs of the parking environment over time. This struck a chord with us, having just been discussing some of the challenges with virtualization.

There's more to the post -- unrelated to "parking lot virtualization" -- that you can read here.

We've updated our technical white paper to reflect Virtual Iron 4. You can download it here.

Here is an excerpt from the Virtual Iron Virtualization Services Architecture section:

- Secure: Extremely compact with no external access except through the Virtualization Manager.
- Reliable: Based on an industry-standard Linux kernel and device drivers.
- Scalable: Automatic deployment option; no software to install or manage on each server.

This approach is different than other virtualization solutions that rely on a full host operating system or console operating system.

Figure 3 provides an architecture overview of the components in Virtual Iron’s Virtualization Services. An open source hypervisor derived from the Xen™ open source project is the first software loaded when the physical server boots. It manages all hardware resources - such as registers, memory and I/O devices. The hypervisor shares resources between virtual servers to ensure that they each receive a designated allotment of processing time and isolates resources to provide each guest operating system with the same degree of protection as if it was deployed on a separate physical host.

When the hypervisor starts, it launches the service partition as a privileged domain (also known as Domain-0) that can touch all hardware and control the hypervisor. The service partition consists of the Novell SLES 10 SP1 kernel, device drivers and user-space modules that provide functionality such as remote management and accelerated I/O. It is completely hidden from user access and has no console login or persistent state. This means there are no additional components to manage or patch, resulting in greater uptime and less administrative costs. The service partition is controlled by the Virtualization Manager through an embedded management agent.

I'm be participating in two sessions at the upcoming InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Form.

The first is a "vendor crossfire" on x86 server virtualization and the other session is on getting started with virtualization. Both are on the first day of the event -- Sept. 24.

For more information ont he event, click here.

We have a new PDF available on our web site which details the Virtual Iron and HP BladeSystem solution:

Virtual Iron with HP BladeSystem: Driving enterprise-class virtualization into the mainstream

Here's a quick excerpt:

Server virtualization you can afford
Server virtualization with Virtual Iron and HP BladeSystem c-Class enables you to increase data center efficiency, reduce server sprawl, and increase business service levels—all at one-fifth the cost of comparable virtualization solutions.

With Virtual Iron, system hardware is separated from specific operating systems and applications, allowing you to deploy a mix of Linux and Microsoft® Windows® applications on a single BladeSystem. The result is an entire virtualized data center in a 17-inch box.

Click here for more on HP and Virtual Iron

Announced today, Virtual Iron 4.0 is one of the first to take advantage of the new Intel VT FlexPriority feature in their Xeon 7300 chips.

For more information, here's the press release. The highpoint is this:

Intel ran its test with Virtual Iron’s latest release, Version 4.0 – which is among the very first server virtualization software solutions to support the new Intel capability. When leveraging Intel VT FlexPriority on Virtual Iron, virtual servers benefited from up to 40% faster boot time and up to 35% performance improvement on 32-bit Windows guests (Windows Server 2000 & 2003 SP1 versions).

And this quote from Steve Noyes:

"Virtual Iron 4.0 showed up to 167% performance improvement on the new Intel Xeon 7300 processor based servers, relative to previous offerings as measured by Intel’s vConsolidate benchmark,” said Steve Noyes, vice president of engineering at Virtual Iron Software. “By turning on Intel VT FlexPriority, we have seen up to 35% incremental performance improvement and up to 40% faster boot time with certain Windows 32-bit guests. This new Intel VT extension allows our solution to avoid the common performance penalty these operating systems introduce when virtualized. This enables truly efficient SMP configurations of 32-bit guests to meet the demands of critical enterprise applications in a virtualized environment"

We've talked a lot about the new features in Virtual Iron 4 but, among the major features we've added, there are a few less obvious additions and changes (as is always the case with a new software release).

One of these changes is that we've removed the commit button. If you've used Virtual Iron, then you know that previously, you had to press the commit button when you made a change. We've heard that this could be cumbersome and so we've changed this. With Virtual Iron 4, all changes made in the virtualization manager are auto-committed.

If you're used to using a non-English keyboard, you can configure Virtual Iron's Virtual Console keyboard to use the keyboard you are most familiar with.

Much of this is possible thanks to some map/keyboard issues that have been fixed in Java 1.6, which is required if you would like to configure the Virtual Console keyword for a non-English keyboard. If you're not on Java 1.6 currently, here are upgrade instructions (if you're already on Java 1.6, click here to skip the Java upgrade details):

There's been a lot of online chatter lately about the open virtual machine format and upcoming virtualization standards (see this article, for example). At Virtual Iron, we believe this is a very good thing for the industry and we're strong supporters of the open virtual machine format for a few simple reasons:

- This will simplify the deployment of multi-tier virtual appliances. In other words, easier for you -- the virtualization user.
- The standard will allow virtual servers that are archived to have more state saved with them. This makes archiving and restoring more resilient and is better for backup and disaster recovery strategies.

We’ve always supported open standards, whether it’s the current Microsoft VHD or the future OVF.

Last Friday, Virtual Iron and other Boston-area virtualization-related vendors were featured on NECN's Business Day program. The video is now available online at NECN's web site.

NECN was in the Virtual Iron offices last week filming for this segment. In addition to a brief interview with Mike Grandinetti, you can see many of our engineers working in our server room.

Last week, John Kelly (Virtual Iron's Director of Product Marketing) presented at Intel's Developer forum in San Francisco alongside Galo Bustamante, Intel's Product Marketing Engineer.

Their presentation slides -- Intel® Virtualization Technology Processor Virtualization Extensions -- are now available online.

A recording of our recent version 4 features and benefits webcast is now available for "on demand" viewing. You can watch it here.

In this webcast, Chris Barclay goes over the new features found in Virtual Iron 4 and goes through a demo.

New to Virtual Iron? Check out our QuickStart Guide which will help get you to a running virtual server in just minutes!

The two main features of this documernt are Getting Started With Virtual Iron and Creating and Booting a Virtual Server.

More webcast goodness: Optimizing Server Virtualization and Consolidation through Data Center Assessment:

Most companies believe they utilize each of their x86 servers at somewhere between 40 - 65%. In reality, it's between 3-7%. The fact is, most servers in the data center are barely used, yet more servers are added each month.

Many organizations struggle with how many servers they have, how they are used and how to manage the growing problem of server sprawl in their data centers. Server virtualization is an effective tool for addressing this problem, but it requires a strategy to have real impact.

This webcast will introduce you to virtual infrastructure -- a managed approach that will help you streamline your virtualization deployment and accelerate its many potential benefits. The presenters will help you understand what it takes to regain control of your x86 server sprawl to:

- Reduce hardware costs by 30-50%
- Reduce data center operating costs by 70-80%
- Reduce the total cost of ownership by 30-70%

Download this new webcast here. You can download all of our archived webcasts from the same page.