Enterprise-Class Virtualization and Management

Virtual Iron provides enterprise-class software solutions for creating and managing virtual infrastructure in the data center. The software provides advanced server virtualization and management capabilities that take advantage of industry standards and open source economics to enable companies to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of enterprise service delivery.

With Virtual Iron, users can:

• Virtualize enterprise-class workloads running on unmodified operating systems.
• Improve the utilization of current systems and reduce power, space and cooling issues through server consolidation.
• Quickly set up development, test and production environments.
• Recover from failures quickly, reliably and cost-efficiently.
• Match resource capacity to workload demands automatically.
• Reduce human labor and errors via policy-based automation.

A Comprehensive Virtualization Solution

The Virtual Iron platform consists of three components:

1. Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager provides a central place to control and automate virtual resources. Virtualization Manager provides the following features and capabilities:

• Physical hardware discovery, bare metal provisioning of Virtualization Services, and resource monitoring.
• Virtual Infrastructure environment creation and hierarchy, visual status dashboards, access controls, performance statistics, and event monitoring.
• Virtual Server creation, configuration, management, deletion, and LiveMigrate™.
• Policy-based automation including LiveCapacity™, LiveRecovery™, LiveMaintenance™, and custom policies.
• Reports of physical and virtual resource utilization, jobs, and system events.

These features and capabilities streamline tasks that are normally highly manual and time-intensive and thereby significantly reduce data center costs and complexity. For example:

• Consolidating many physical servers through server partitioning.
• Creating new virtual servers in minutes to deploy business services from templates.
• Reducing the cost and complexity of business continuity.
• Automating the data center using policies.

2. Virtual Iron Virtualization Services are deployed automatically on bare-metal, industry-standard servers without requiring software installation or management. The services consist of:

• A management agent that works with the Virtualization Manager to manage virtual infrastructure.
• Back-end drivers that work with VSTools to improve virtual IO performance.
• LiveMigrate™, a feature allowing virtual servers to move between physical servers without pausing operating systems or applications.
• Multi-pathing to provide failover in the event of hardware failures.
• Resource monitoring for automatic recovery of virtual servers in event of failure.

As a result, users get streamlined data center management and reduced operational costs.

3. Open Source Virtualization, based on an open source hypervisor derived from the Xen™ open source community project, is the first software loaded when the physical server boots. The hypervisor manages all hardware resources and leverages the hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities built into Intel and AMD processors to create an abstraction layer between physical hardware and virtual resources.


Product Editions 
Virtual Iron is available in three different editions:

Virtual Iron Professional Edition supports partitioning and basic management of a single Virtualized Node (Maximum 2 sockets) and is available at no charge. Click here to download.


Virtual Iron Consolidation Edition supports server partitioning and basic management for multi-server configuration and support. Click here to download.


Virtual Iron Enterprise Edition enables server partitioning for multi-server configuration and advanced management capabilities for rapid provisioning, high availability (LiveMigrate™, LiveRecovery™), disaster recovery (LiveRecovery™), workload management and policy-based automation (LiveCapacity™). Click here to download.

The table below compares features and pricing for each edition of the Virtual Iron product.

Virtual Iron supports the following operating systems:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4  32- and 64-Bit  
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9  32- and 64-Bit  
• Windows XP (32-Bit)  (Version 3.1)
• Windows 2003 (32-Bit)  (Version 3.1)

Virtual Iron Solutions

The Virtual Iron Difference