Virtual Iron virtualizes servers to allow multiple, multi-processor guest operating systems to run concurrently on the same physical hardware. With Virtual Iron, memory, CPU, and I/O loads are balanced to ensure optimal application performance. Heterogeneous physical resources appear as homogeneous virtual resources, reducing complexity.
Virtual Iron virtualizes network and storage connections to provide access to the resources of external networks. Virtual networks are configured on the management server and decouple the association of virtual servers from physical gateways and fibre channel switches, simplifying virtual server configuration and migrations. Each virtual device is equally accessible from any physical server and supports multi-pathing to provide load balancing and hardware failover transparently to the guest operating system.
| Features | Benefits |
| Open Source hypervisor | Industry standards provide rapid innovation and prevent vendor lock-in. |
| Bare-metal virtualization services | No software is installed on physical hardware, simplifying deployments and upgrades. |
| Efficient server partitioning | Consolidation and improved server utilization. |
| Support for up to 8 CPUs, 32 and 64-bit operating systems, 96GB RAM and 8 vNICs per virtual server | Supports everything from small to large multi-processor virtual servers – key for handling enterprise-class workloads. |
| LiveMigrate™ | Move to a new physical server without any application downtime to gain additional capacity or to perform maintenance. |
| Fault isolation | Prevents a crash in one virtual server from impacting other virtual servers. |
| Security isolation | A virtual server may never access the memory or I/O operations of another virtual server. |
| Resource isolation | Runaway applications in one virtual server do not cause the others to starve. |
| Hardware-assisted virtualization | Low virtualization overhead to deliver fast performance on resource-intensive workloads. |