Virtual Iron Announces General Availability of Version 3.0 and Offers Free Product for Download 

Virtualization and Management Platform Delivers Enterprise-Class Performance, Support for Unmodified 32 and 64-Bit Linux, and a Market-Defining, Affordable Price Point

LOWELL, MA - October 16, 2006 – Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of software solutions for creating and managing virtual infrastructure, today announced the general availability of Version 3.0 of its product platform. With Version 3.0, Virtual Iron is the first to deliver an enterprise-class, open-source based virtualization management solution. Version 3.0 also takes full advantage of Intel’s new hardware-assisted virtualization technology available now across Intel platforms. With the new release, Virtual Iron sets a new price point for state of the art virtualization at less than half of the cost of other solutions.

The company also announced the availability of a single-use edition of the product for free, via download from its website at www.virtualiron.com/downloads.

"With the general availability of Version 3.0, Virtual Iron brings to market a unique virtualization solution optimized for Intel® Virtualization Technology available in Dual-Core Intel Xeon® platforms,” said Diane Bryant, Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Server Platforms Group. "This solution, built on the open source hypervisor, raises the bar on enterprise-class virtualization capabilities, allowing our mutual customers to efficiently deploy business critical applications in a virtualized environment while leveraging Intel’s leading platform performance."

Virtual Iron 3.0 combines advanced virtualization services and policy-based management capabilities with an open source hypervisor derived from the Xen* community project. It is the first native virtualization software and management solution to support unmodified 32 and 64-bit operating systems while obtaining superior performance from hardware-assisted virtualization including Intel® VT. As a result, end-users can apply Virtual Iron’s solution to virtualize performance sensitive enterprise-class applications on the Intel hardware platform. The software automates many time-intensive manual tasks such as provisioning new servers and applications, moving capacity to handle dynamic workloads. In addition, it includes service-level automation features for monitoring physical systems and automatically responds to availability issues. These capabilities enable users to streamline data center management while dramatically reducing capital and operating expenses.

“Good management tools can result in more controlled, more easily managed, better performing environments,” said Gartner in a recent research report titled Virtualizing x86 Servers Means More Than Just the Hypervisors and VMMs. The report adds, “Resource management and systems management such as resource monitoring should guarantee each virtual machine its own set of resources on shared hardware, rapid provisioning and integration between the virtualization tools and high availability.”

“Our product is the first open source virtualization and management solution designed to meet the demanding needs of enterprise data centers,” said John C. Thibault, President and CEO of Virtual Iron. “The feedback from our Beta customers has been overwhelmingly positive. Based on their experience, we are confident that Virtual Iron will quickly become the primary alternative to VMware.”

Product Editions
Virtual Iron 3.0 is available in three different versions:

• Virtual Iron 3.0 Professional Edition  – enables native virtualization and management of a single physical server (up to two sockets) and is available at no charge via download at www.virtualiron.com/downloads.
• Virtual Iron 3.0 Consolidation Edition – this is specifically packaged to help meet the needs of server consolidation projects. It offers native virtualization of multi-server configurations; physical to virtual server conversion; and advanced management.
• Virtual Iron 3.0 Enterprise Edition - enables native virtualization for multi-server configurations and advanced management capabilities for rapid provisioning, live migrations with zero downtime (LiveMigrate), high availability (LiveRecovery), capacity management (LiveCapacity) and policy-based automation (LiveMaintenance).

Virtual Iron delivers its software exclusively through a core group of channel partners in each region. Limited-use editions of the product can also be downloaded directly at www.virtualiron.com/downloads.

About Virtual Iron Software, Inc.
Virtual Iron provides software solutions for creating and managing virtual infrastructure. Its software enables companies to dramatically reduce the complexity and cost of managing and operating their enterprise data center. The company delivers advanced capabilities that exploit industry standards, open source economics and processors with virtualization technology built-in. Organizations use Virtual Iron’s software for consolidation, rapid provisioning, business continuity, disaster recovery, capacity management and policy-based automation to deliver significant improvements in utilization, manageability and agility. Virtual Iron is privately held and based in Lowell, Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.virtualiron.com or email info@virtualiron.com.

###

 *Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.