Virtual Iron: Server Virtualisation

Virtual Iron software

Virtual Iron Virtualisation 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.
  

Virtual Iron Virtualisation Manager

Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager provides a Java-based web application that can be securely run in any browser. It enables software-based reconfiguration of CPU, memory, network and storage resources without changes to physical hardware.

The software includes several unique features: LiveMigrate™ enables users to move a workload from one server to another without disruption. LiveCapacity™ allows processors and memory to be dynamic, allowing an application to continue running without disruption while resources are transparently added and removed. LiveMaintenance™ supports dynamic resources for upgrades and maintenance. And LiveRecovery™ moves virtual servers to maintain uptime in the event of a hardware failure.

Key Features & Benefits
• Centralised resource management
• Hardware Discovery
• Unified management of virtual and physical resources
• Automatic discovery of physical resources such as servers, network and storage
• Policy-driven resource and workload management
• Automates application management to SLAs and reduces administrative overhead
• Performance and availability reports
• Provides capacity planning, what-if scenarios, and post-incident analysis
• Advanced templating and cloning of virtual servers
• Manage all OS and application images from one place
• Simplifies server deployments and migrations
• LiveMaintenance Maintenance without disruption, capacity on demand
• LiveRecovery High availability with less hardware
• LiveCapacity — dynamically scalable processors and memory

Resources such as CPUs, Memory, storage and network adaptors — can be changed without impacting running applications or changing the physical environment.

Jobs and Alerts Uses transactional management to provide audit trail and notifications of data centre reconfigurations.

Industry-standard virtual hard disk format and virtual volume management

Enable on demand deployment, rapid provisioning and hardware storage independence.

Architecture

The Virtual Iron Platform requires a set of x86 servers linked via a standard Ethernet network. Virtualization Manager is installed on one server that is networked to the other servers. Operating system images, including installed enterprise applications, are stored in a network accessible location using NAS or SAN to be deployed on virtual servers. Alternatively, deployment applications can be used to install an operating system directly onto a virtual server.

The Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager automatically inventories the physical infrastructure and presents it through the management user interface. When an administrator creates and configures virtual servers, the Virtualization Manager reserves the physical resources, configures the virtual server resources, deploys the operating system, and starts the virtual server.

Supported Operating Systems
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 and 2003 (32-bit)

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