If you're evaluating Virtual Iron and have a question, there are a number of support options available to you:

- Check our KnowledgeBase
- Post a question in our forums
- Post a comment right here on the blog
- Contact your local reseller -- our resellers are all trained and ready to help customers with their questions
- Check out all of our online product documentation
- Search our website for answers

Yesterday, we announced that storage solutions from NetApp are certified on Virtual Iron.

The combination of NetApp's storage solutions with our virtualization solution give you a very easy to use and cost-effective solution for a virtualized infrastructure. The combined solution is certainly flexible and gives you the ability to implement a fully virtualized environment to increase storage capacity, create a disaster recovery solution and improve workload migrations (and more).

Byte and Switch is reporting on the Storage Decisions Conference that Virtual Iron is presenting and speaking at.

On our announcement with NetApp:

In yet another example of the converging worlds of server and storage virtualization, NetApp has certified its storage solutions to work with Virtual Iron's server virtualization software.

"This allows much easier management of shared storage from the Virtual Iron environment," says Mike Grandinetti, Virtual Iron's chief marketing officer. Virtual Iron has similar deals in place with IBM, HP, LeftHand Networks, Compellent, and EqualLogic.

Over on his Virtually Speaking blog at ZDNet, Dan Kusnetzky talks a bit about Ed Walsh's comments at the Storage Decision Conference:

I think that Ed’s comments are particularly well taken. I believe that it is crucial that organizations have a complete plan, an architecture so to speak, that defines how they are going to put all six layers of virtualization technology to work in their datacenter. A piecemeal approach is likely to become a prison that eventually makes it hard for the organization to succeed.

For more on what Ed said at the conference and Dan's comments, read his full post.

This week, it seems like it's been all about Virtual Iron and storage. We're out at the Storage Decisions conference, had an announcement with NetApp, etc.

For more information how Virtual Iron's solution works well with storage, a sampling of storage vendors that we work with, some customers that are using Virtual Iron with one of the storage vendors and more, visit our new storage and server virtualization page.

Ed Walsh's speech from Storage Decisions was recorded, which you can view right here:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Ed also gave a short speech during the cocktail reception, which you can watch here:

Xconomy is discussing whether or not companies are choosing VMware or the competition (us) and asking why people have chosen their particular solution. Read the full article here and pay special attention to the comments of two Virtual Iron customers (emphasis mine):

I head up an IT Department at a Law Firm and we chose Virtual Iron over VMWare. Despite the fact that VMWare told me to my face that we were too small (85 users/15 Servers) for them to help put together a business case for our Shareholders, I evaluated their product.

I found that Virtual Iron offered ALL of the features that were necessary and in addition to helping with the development of a business case specific to our business, VI had one of their engineers call to speak in great length about hardware requirements, features and the product roadmap. In my opinion, even if I had the budget for VMWare, I still would have gone with Virtual Iron as their level of support and professionalism is superior.

and

“My company spent a year evaluating VMWare and Virtual Iron after visiting Linux World, and chose Virtual Iron,” said a reader who identified himself as Paul Joncas of Meganet. “VMware has some bells and whistles that others don’t have at this time, but [Virtual Iron] is equivalent when it comes to the key features and capabilities that are the core reason for deploying a virtualized server array.”

We've announced version 4.2 of Virtual Iron, which includes some great new features:

- LiveSnapshot™ lets you easily take virtual server snapshots for hot backup and patch management. What does this mean? No downtime required for backups on live virtual machines and reduced virtual machine patching.

- Multi-Pathing for virtual server networks (ethernet and fibre channel) provides increased business continuity and redundancy.

- Additional OS support Virtual Iron 4.2 supports all of these plus new additions RHEL5 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 10.

- Virtual Iron's virtual server tools are now packaged as an ISO, making deployment and upgrades easier than ever before.

Click here for more on Virtual Iron 4.2.

Dan Kusnetzky of ZDNet discusses our version 4.2 release here.

His "snapshot analysis" of Virtual Iron 4.2 is:

This release clearly is aimed at “one upping” a few of other suppliers such as VMware, Cassatt, Egenera and Scalent Systems. While each of those suppliers offers features that Virtual Iron does not yet have, it is clear that the gauntlet has been thrown down.

Those examining tools that combine virtual machine software, management of virtual resources and storage virtualization might find Virtual Iron interesting.

The Linux Beacon at IT Jungle discusses the increased Linux support in v4.2:

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.

Read the full article here.

bMighty.com has posted Five Simple Rules for Going Virtual:

1. Implement slowly.
2. Show your executives the money (savings).
3. Download vendors' free products and try them out.
4. Try not to let third-party products overwhelm you.
5. Establish a "default virtualization" policy.

For more detail, see the full article here.

Archi-TECH discussed virtual bottlenecks and the multipathing feature in Virtual Iron 4.2:

Virtualization system vendors are finally taking the impact their technology is having on the network seriously, responding with novel ways to ensure that multiple virtual servers have equal access to network resources, particularly storage, without overwhelming existing infrastructures.

...

One of them is multipathing, which can be found on the Virtual Iron 4.2 to connect virtual machines to either Ethernet or Fibre Channel networks as a means to boost redundancy and business continuity. In a multipath environment, data is split along separate I/O paths so individual network interconnections don’t get bogged down.

Full article here.

JumpBox has released four new virtual appliances ready for use on Virtual Iron:

- Alfresco: Open source content management system.

- OTRS: An open source trouble ticket package.

- Bugzilla: Popular web-based bug tracking system.

- Mantis: Also a popular web-based bug tracking system.

bMighty has a great article up on using virtualization in smaller companies, which features a profile of Virtual Iron customer Owen Bird:

Owen Bird, a full-service, midsize law firm, uses virtualization technology from Virtual Iron, and it's made a big difference to Bakerman. "The infrastructure for me was key, and I worked at changing the servers that were problematic," says Bakerman.

When Stephen Bakerman joined Owen Bird Law Corp., in Vancouver, British Columbia, nearly nine years ago, the IT infrastructure was a "mishmash of everything."

To clean things up, Bakerman -- Owen Bird's information technology manager and one-man IT department -- has taken the 88-employee law firm virtual. He is currently running 17 hardware servers and recently purchased four more to be dedicated to virtualization. His intention is to run 17 virtual servers on five hardware boxes.

It's happening all over the place: companies outside of the Fortune 500 are seeing the real benefit of virtualization -- and not just for server consolidation but also for disaster recovery and ease of use.

Have you put virtualization into production yet? What benefits are you seeing? What's the size of your company?

A recording of our recent webcast with Xcalibre is now available for on-demand viewing.

This webcast focuses on how virtualization (and Virtual Iron, in particular) has been helping XCalibre to increase their service levels, simplify infrastructure management and reduce operational costs.

The webcast is available here.

A profile of how XCalibre uses virtualization is also available on our website.

Earlier this week, Virtual Iron and JumpBox co-hosted a webcast on deploying open-source virtual appliances in just minutes. This webcast is now available as a recording.

The webcast description reads: "Learn how JumpBox, Inc. and Virtual Iron allow you to deliver open source, server-based application deployments in minutes. JumpBox is an innovative provider of virtual appliances that has just released a new line of applications for Virtual Iron’s server virtualization platform. The new appliances allow users to deploy server-based applications on Virtual Iron environments in a fraction of the time it would normally take."

Click here to view this webcast.

Also note that earlier this week, JumpBox announced four new virtual appliances ready for use with Virtual Iron.

Network World posted a Clear Choice Test of Virtual Iron and the bottom line is that they "found Virtual Iron’s day-to-day use to be simple and reliable — two very good qualities in a VM hosting scheme."

This review is very detailed and provides a lot of good information for anybody looking to implement a virtual environment.

Note that this review is based on version 3 and that we're currently on version 4, which has many improvements to make Virtual Iron even easier to use and more reliable.

ServerWatch posted seven virtualization trends to look for in 2008:

1. Security Will Loom Large
2. Easy Money Won't Be Quite So Easy Anymore
3. Value-Add Will Be Critical
4. Vendor Consolidation Will Continue
5. Microsoft Will Make Waves
6. Storage and Servers Will Converge
7. I/O and Automation Will Become Increasingly Critical

More details in the full article.

A case study of the Owen Bird Law Firm, which uses Virtual Iron in a production environment, is up on our web site (it's actually a press release, but it's a good read!) -- here's a short excerpt:

“We tested out pretty much all of the virtualization offerings before settling on Virtual Iron,” said Stephen Bakerman, IT manager at Owen Bird. “Even if we had the money to go with VMware, I would still go with Virtual Iron. Their feature set is very competitive with VMware. The support is phenomenal and the technology capabilities continue to improve. If you’re looking for something that’s simple to use and easy to get around with, Virtual Iron is the way to go.”

Read the rest of the article here.

On January 8, we will be co-hosting a webcast with HP that will discuss how to build virtual infrastructure using the latest in blade server technology.

Here's the description of the webcast, which will be on January 8 at 2pm EST:

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 hardware and software solutions and how they 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.

Click here to register

Sys-Con's Virtualization Journal talks a bit about Virtual Iron 4.2:

Virtual Iron figures when its 4.2 release pops out this month it'll be the first Xen-based virtualization solution to offer such niceties as LiveSnapshots of virtual servers for hot backup and patch management [...] and virtual disks; and multi-pathing for virtual server Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks in support of business continuity and redundancy. It also includes broader operating system support - like Red Hat 5 and SUSE 10 - and packaged tools that appear to the administrator like a virtual CD.

To try Virtual Iron 4.2, request a trial from our web site.