The start-up is bringing another twist to the fast-growing virtualization market by announcing that it will support virtualization software from other vendors with its management products.
When Virtual Iron Software debuted in February, analysts singled out the company for taking a unique approach to server virtualization by not only slicing up single physical servers, but also by making multiple small machines appear to be one big symmetric multiprocessing box. This week, the start-up is bringing another twist to the fast-growing virtualization market by announcing that it will support virtualization software from other vendors with its management products.
Virtual Iron plans to announce at LinuxWorld in San Francisco that its management platform will support Xen , an open source server virtualization technology.
This means end users will be able to use Virtual Iron’s management tools to handle not only Virtual Iron VMs, but also those created with the Xen VM monitor. A VM is basically a software file that contains an operating system and application.
“What they’re doing that’s interesting now is saying, ‘OK, we may not be the only people providing the virtual machine software that people want to use,'” says Dan Kusnetzky, an analyst at IDC. “They realize that management and provisioning and security are very important issues to people. . . . They have developed this really powerful management environment, and they’re extending it to encompass more of the kind of work people are likely to be doing.”
The Virtual Iron management platform enables end users to set policy-based rules to move workloads across servers according to application demands.
The Virtual Iron management platform provides the ability to create VMs, move them from one physical server to another without disrupting applications, start VMs, pause them, restart them, track performance, and – perhaps most importantly – enables users to distribute workloads across all of the different physical servers available.
By extending its management tools to include Xen, Virtual Iron is giving end users an even more unified view of their data center, Kusnetzky says. “Whether they will manage [SWsoft or VMware] environments seem to be the next obvious question to ask,” he says.
The Xen VM monitor management module will be available in the fourth quarter as a standard part of the Virtual Iron platform. Virtual Iron also will release the module under an open source license.
The Virtual Iron platform is priced per CPU bundle, typically 32, 64 or 128. The average price per CPU is less than $1,000.
