Getting Virtual

By Jennifer Mears, NetworkWorld.com, 08/08/05

Virtual Iron is a pretty cool start-up. It's doing some interesting things with virtualization. Like competitors such as VMware, Microsoft and SWsoft, it slices and dices single physical servers in multiple virtual machines. But it adds a twist that analysts say really sets it apart: it virtualizes multiple physical machines into one big pool of resources. So applications and operating systems think they're running on just one big SMP box. HP, IBM and others also do this type of thing, but they require clustering software underneath it all, which often requires rejiggering of applications. Virtual Iron does it all transparently - no changes necessary. That's always good to hear. This week at LinuxWorld, Virtual Iron will be announcing that it will support the Xen open source virtualization technology (Link to my Monday story here). That means end users can manage and monitor not only Virtual Iron virtual machines, but also those created with Xen. From the sounds of it, end users can expect Virtual Iron to support other virtualization technologies, such as those from VMware and SWsoft down the road. Maybe we really are getting closer to a truly dynamic data center. Check out more about Virtual Iron.

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