Virtual Iron to Make Xen Enterprise-Ready with New Advanced Virtualization and Management Capabilities

Company to Deliver First-Ever ‘Native Virtualization,’ Support for Unmodified Linux and Windows Operating Systems, and Open Source Virtualization Stack

Boston, MA - April 3, 2006, Linux World – Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of software solutions for creating and managing virtual infrastructure in the data center, today announced Version 3 of its product platform. It will combine Virtual Iron’s advanced virtualization and policy-based management capabilities with the open source Xen hypervisor and allow customers to run existing 32 and 64 bit Linux and Windows operating systems without modification. As a result, users will gain dramatic reductions in the cost and complexity of managing and operating their data center while preserving investments in their existing software stack.

“The industry needs an alternative to proprietary and expensive virtualization solutions,” said Eric Bogatie, President of NI Solutions, a managed web service provider. “We want to leverage open source economics to consolidate our multi-OS data centers, but we require proven reliability, scalability and manageability to ensure we deliver on our service level agreements. With this new release, Virtual Iron is offering an enterprise-class solution based on open, industry-standards. We like the direction they are taking.”

“[The] Xen [product] uses an open-source distribution model. This, together with Xen’s gathering vendor support and the increasingly urgent need to solve the problems of ‘server sprawl’ – sets the stage for a potentially dramatic industry shift,” said Tom Bittman, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner.

With Version 3, Virtual Iron will be the first to deliver ‘native virtualization,’ which takes full advantage of new Intel Virtualization Technology, the hardware-assisted capabilities built into Intel processors, and requires no installation or management of the virtualization services on physical servers. As a result, users streamline data center management and reduce operational costs. The new architecture also enables Virtual Iron to support both Linux and Windows operating systems.

“By leveraging Intel Virtualization Technology and open source standards, Virtual Iron continues to increase flexibility and reduce total cost of ownership for enterprise customers,” said Diane Bryant, Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Server Platforms Group. “This innovation on top of Intel’s industry-leading Xeon platforms enables Virtual Iron to efficiently create new and better software capabilities for users.”

The release also includes Virtual Iron’s policy-based Virtualization Manager, a central place for users to monitor and automate all virtual resources, reducing the costs and complexity of enterprise service delivery. With these capabilities, customers can virtualize servers and manage applications, including those that require large amounts of memory and multiple CPUs.

Virtual Iron will offer a single-server version of the software at no charge that can be downloaded from www.virtualiron.com/products/Downloads. The company is also an active participant in the large industry ecosystem being formed around Xen by companies such as AMD, HP, IBM, Intel, and Novell and it will continue to contribute its expertise in enterprise-class virtualization to the Xen community.

Virtual Iron specializes in data center virtualization and policy-based management solutions that deliver maximum reliability, performance and scalability to production-level applications on industry-standard hardware. The software partitions servers to run multiple operating systems simultaneously and increases utilization by managing the pooling and sharing of a large number of server, storage and network elements. This enables users to automate many time-intensive manual tasks such as provisioning new servers and moving capacity to handle dynamic workloads. It also monitors physical systems and automatically responds to availability issues. The platform is designed for production-class performance and scalability and can support hundreds of industry-standard physical servers and thousands of virtual servers. The resulting benefits include reduced data center complexity, increased agility and resource utilization, and dramatically reduced capital and operating expenses.

“Virtual Iron is focused on delivering enterprise-class virtualization and management capabilities that exploit industry standard and open source economics,” said John C. Thibault, president and CEO of Virtual Iron. “By combining our production-proven capabilities with the Xen open source hypervisor and a new economic price point, we’re offering customers the highest performance possible while dramatically reducing their total cost of ownership in the data center.”

Commercial and Open Source Offerings
Virtual Iron Version 3 product suite will include:

• The Xen Open Source Hypervisor, which supports multiple 32 and 64 bit operating systems and takes full advantage of Intel Virtualization Technology. It also supports multiple physical CPUs, large memory and other physical server resource management.
• Virtual Iron Virtualization Services, an open source software stack available under a GPL license, that includes virtual storage and network connectivity, virtual server resource management, server logical partitioning, high performance drivers, and hot-plug CPU and memory.
• Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager, which includes a web-based graphical user interface to administer the virtual environment. It uses a built-in policy engine which provides advanced capabilities such as LiveCapacity*, LiveMigrate*, LiveRecovery* and LiveMaintenance*, and an event monitor to optimize application performance, ensure high availability and simplify resource management. Virtualization Manager also enables rapid provisioning and reconfiguration through operating system templates and cloning.

The new release will be available in three editions:

• Open Virtual Iron for Xen/ Community Edition – will be available at no charge via download from www.virtualiron.com/products/Downloads with a GPL license. This edition supports the Xen development community and includes the Virtual Iron Open Source Virtualization Services Stack.
• Virtual Iron 3 for Xen / Professional Edition – will also be available at no charge via download from www.virtualiron.com/products/Downloads. This edition supports partitioning and management of a single server and is comprised of the Virtual Iron Open Source Virtualization Services Stack under a GPL license, and the Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager, with a limited use commercial license.
• Virtual Iron 3 for Xen / Enterprise Edition – for multi-server configuration and support. This edition is comprised of the Virtual Iron Open Source Virtualization Services Stack, under a GPL license, and Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager, available via a commercial license, which enables advanced capabilities for high availability, disaster recovery, workload management and policy-based automation.

Virtual Iron 3 for Xen will be available for Beta testing supporting Linux guests in July 2006 and Windows guests in September 2006. Average pricing for Enterprise Edition will start at $1,500 for a single server, including Virtualization Services and Virtualization Manager.

Broad Industry Support
With its decision to leverage the Xen open source hypervisor, Intel Virtualization Technology and unmodified operating systems, Virtual Iron is receiving broad industry support.

“The price tag for a rich hypervisor will drop significantly, and the business model will shift to management and automation tools”, said Tom Bittman, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner. **

“Virtual Iron’s support for industry standards brings users a new level of choice and flexibility in the enterprise data center,” said Juhi Jotwani, director of BladeCenter Solutions, IBM Systems and Technology Group. “IBM BladeCenter customers are increasingly exploiting virtualization as a means to reduce TCO while capitalizing on production-class performance.”

"Novell and Virtual Iron are focused on delivering enterprise-class virtual infrastructure management solutions for the data center based upon open standards such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and the Xen hypervisor" said Roger Levy, vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions for Novell. "This partnership is an important part of our continued commitment to offer customers their choice of industry-leading virtualization solutions."

"Akibia is working with a number of Fortune 1000 companies to help them lower total cost of ownership in the data center by migrating to industry standard infrastructure like x86 servers and Linux." said Ken Mclaurin, Senior Open Source Marketing Manager at Akibia. "By combining the Xen hypervisor with its own advanced virtualization capabilities, Virtual Iron has the ability to deliver the enterprise-class performance these customers are accustomed to receiving on proprietary Unix platforms."

“A new challenge will appear in 2006. Open source project Xen 3.0 is being re-written to leverage Intel’s VT support and avoid the need to modify guest OSs said Tom Bittman, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner . **


About Virtual Iron Software, Inc.
Virtual Iron provides Xen-based 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 is focused on delivering advanced virtualization 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, workload 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. 


* Virtual Iron, LiveCapacity, LiveMigrate, LiveRecovery and LiveMaintenance are trademarks of Virtual Iron Software, Inc.
** Virtualization: Taking Charge of Your Servers; December 2005 Gartner Data Center Summit.