Virtual Iron: Server Virtualisation

Virtual Iron software

Key Features and Capabilities

Virtual Iron provides a comprehensive solution for virtualisation and management that is less than 20% of the cost of comparable competitive offerings.

Virtual Iron delivers a unique set of advanced virtualisation capabilities that sets Virtual Iron apart from other offerings in the marketplace.

Native Virtualization based on an open source hypervisor
Virtual Iron’s approach to virtualisation is efficient, easy to manage and based on an open source hypervisor. The software dramatically streamlines virtual server  management and reduces operational costs by:

• Fully leveraging hardware-assisted virtualisation capabilities for optimal virtualisation efficiency

• Enabling 32- and 64-bit x86 operating systems to run unmodified and
  concurrently on a partitioned server

• Requiring no installation or management of the virtualization layer

Dynamic Infrastructure
Virtual Iron optimises the utilisation of all data centre hardware resources to deliver capacity on demand, real-time configurability and high availability with less redundancy. First-generation technologies are limited to static assignment of resource capacity. Virtual Iron supports dynamic resources that allow your software to handle peak workloads without over-scaling or service disruption.

Policy-Driven Resource and Workload Management
Virtual Iron’s unique policy-driven automation simplifies the management of computing resources and enables rapid provisioning and deployment without increased administrative overhead. Features like LiveMigrate™, LiveCapacity™, LiveMaintenance™, and LiveRecovery™ enable automated and dynamic resource management.

Price/Performance Leadership
Open source economics and efficient use of physical resources provide dramatic cost reductions. Hardware-assisted virtualisation minimises overhead to provide virtualisation benefits to the broadest range of applications. Virtual Iron is less than 20 percent the cost of comparable competitive offerings.

VIRTUAL IRON VIRTUALIZATION SERVICES AND OPEN SOURCE HYPERVISOR

Virtual Iron virtualises 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 also virtualises 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 provides load balancing and hardware failover transparently to the guest operating system.

Key Features & Benefits

• Open source hypervisor: Industry standards provide rapid innovation and prevent vendor lock-in.

• Bare-metal virtualisation services: No software is installed on physical hardware, simplifying deployments and upgrades.

• Efficient server partitioning: Consolidation and improved server utilization.

Support for up to 32 CPUs per physical server, 32- and 64-bit operating systems, 96 GB RAM and 8vNICS per virtual server. Supports everything from small to large multi-processor virtual servers — key for handling enterprise-class workloads.

• 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 virtualisation: Low virtualisation overhead to deliver fast  performance on resource-intensive workloads.

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