Virtual Iron
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Virtualization software |
| Founded | 2003 |
| Founder | Alex Vasilevsky |
| Defunct | 2009 |
| Fate | Acquired by Oracle Corporation; product suite terminated |
| Headquarters | Lowell, Massachusetts , United States |
| Products | Virtualization and virtual infrastructure management solutions (Virtual Iron platform, VI-Center) |
Virtual Iron Software, headquartered in Lowell, Massachusetts, specialized in creating proprietary virtualization and virtual infrastructure management solutions. Founded by Alex Vasilevsky, the company was among the pioneers in delivering virtualization software that fully utilized Intel VT-x and AMD-V hardware-assisted virtualization technologies.
In May 2009, Oracle Corporation announced its intention to acquire Virtual Iron Software, Inc., pending standard closing procedures. Following the acquisition, Oracle halted all updates and patches for Virtual Iron’s products, including those released prior to the takeover. By June 2009, Oracle officially terminated the Virtual Iron product suite.
Virtual Iron platform
The Virtual Iron software supported both unaltered 32-bit and 64-bit guest operating systems, providing performance close to native speeds. Its virtualization manager facilitated centralized oversight, automation, configuration, and monitoring of virtual assets. The platform automatically deployed virtualization services on compatible hardware without requiring extra software and was built upon the open source Xen hypervisor.
Designed to deliver solutions for server consolidation, business continuity, and capacity planning, the platform consisted of a virtualization manager (VI-Center), virtualization servers, and a hypervisor component. VI-Center—a Java-based application—offered centralized management for virtualized server environments. Multiple virtual servers running unmodified guest OSs were hosted on physical hardware.
Virtual Iron accommodated both physical and virtual storage configurations. The virtual storage setup employed SAN systems to establish fault-tolerant clusters of virtual nodes via iSCSI or Fibre Channel. VI-Center was compatible with Windows and Linux operating systems; administrators set up a "management network" for cluster communications and utilized it to perform PXE booting of connected servers.
The platform included features aimed at improving availability and resource efficiency: LiveRecovery provided high availability configurations; LiveCapacity balanced CPU workloads; LivePower optimized power consumption. Additional capabilities encompassed disk and virtual machine cloning (snapshots) along with support for IPMI/ILO.
"Native virtualization"
Virtual Iron employed a method they called native virtualization, which is based on full virtualization that leverages hardware-assisted virtualization instead of relying on paravirtualization techniques. This strategy allowed guest operating systems to run without modification while taking advantage of hardware enhancements to boost performance. Virtual Iron asserted that it was among the first companies to implement native virtualization.
The organization preferred this native virtualization approach over paravirtualization due to advancements from Intel and AMD that delivered near-physical hardware performance without the need for altering operating systems. Virtual Iron emphasized that most users favored deploying unmodified OSs unless there were compelling advantages, making the compromises involved in paravirtualization unnecessary.
See also
- Comparison of platform virtualization software
- Virtual machine
- Platform virtualization
- x86 virtualization
External links
- Defunct software companies of the United States
- Virtualization software
- Software companies established in 2003
- 2003 establishments in Massachusetts
- American companies established in 2003
- Software companies disestablished in 2009
- 2009 disestablishments in Massachusetts
- American companies disestablished in 2009
- 2009 mergers and acquisitions