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Virtual Iron

Virtual Iron

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  • SKU: VIRTUAIRON


Server virtualisation and management tool.
Virtual Iron is a server virtualisation & virtual infrastructure management solution. The product offers comparable capabilities and performance to established offerings and is easy to deploy, use and manage.

By taking full advantage of industry standards and open source economics, Virtual Iron dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of virtualization and for the first time, makes production-ready capabilities available to the mainstream market.

Virtual Iron - Features

Features & Capabilities

The Virtual Iron solution consists of three components:
  • VI - Center provides a central place to control and automate virtual resources. It streamlines tasks that are normally highly manual and time-intensive and significantly reduces data center costs and complexity.

  • Virtual Iron Virtualization Services are deployed automatically on bare-metal, industry-standard servers without requiring software installation or management. These features streamline data center management and reduce operational costs.

  • Open Source Virtualization, based on an open source hypervisor derived from the 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.

Virtualization Platform

Features Benefit
LiveProvisioning A "zero touch" automated deployment capability that eliminates the need for physical installation or management of virtualization software on physical servers
Virtual Storage Management Create virtual storage on the fly from local, fibre channel or iSCSI storage servers
Virtual Network Management Create virtual switches that allow virtual machines to use standard networks or vLANs transparently
Virtual Machine Creation Wizard Use the virtual machine create wizard to simply create virtual infrastructure by cloning existing templates or creating new servers
  • Up to 8 CPUs
  • Up to 32 GB RAM
  • Up to 5 NICs with unique MAC addresses
  • Scheduling priority
  • Resource throttling
LiveMigration Migrate workloads from one physical server to another, for example to provide additional capacity, without any application downtime.
LiveCapacity LiveCapacity optimizes virtual machine performance and data center utilization. It accomplishes this by rebalancing nodes by moving virtual machines when the node's CPU utilization is above a threshold.
LiveRecovery Automates virtual machine recovery from physical hardware failures without the cost and complexity of clustering software. Virtual machines can be automatically restarted on new hardware when physical hardware fails, reducing outage duration and operational costs
LiveMaintenance LiveMaintenance automates the process of taking a physical server out of service for maintenance, such as adding more physical memory, without impacting the virtual machines running on it. LiveMaintenance uses LiveMigrate to move virtual machines -- without stopping operating systems or applications -- to other nodes in the virtual data center.
LiveSnapshot LiveSnapshot creates space-efficient point in time images of running or stopped virtual machines. LiveSnapshot makes it easy to try patches and roll back to previous states, or backup a running virtual machine.
LivePower LivePower optimizes ata center power consumption by monitoring resource utilization in the virtual data center. When there is excess CPU capacity, LivePower consolidates virtual machines onto fewer servers and shuts down physical servers that are not running virtual machines, based on pre-defined policies. When virtual machine load increases beyond pre-defined thresholds, LivePower turns on physical servers and LiveMigrates virtual machines to rebalance the virtual data center and ensure that resource requirements and service levels are met.
LiveConvert An automated software solution powered by PlateSpin that enables customers to easily migrate 32-bit Windows workloads (data, applications, and operating systems) from physical, virtual and image-based infrastructures. LiveConvert provides Virtual Iron users with the ability to quickly migrate workloads between physical servers and virtual machines allowing users to quickly achieve the benefits of large-scale server consolidation.
Jobs and Reports View historical information on system performance or administrative actions in the data center. Useful for capacity planning, billing, and 404 auditing.
User based access control Perform user management locally or connect with Microsoft Active Directory or LDAP servers. Prevent unauthorized users from using the system. Monitor changes based on user actions for compliance purposes.

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Virtual Iron - System Requirements

Users require the following to install and run Virtual Iron.

Extended Enterprise Edition

Virtual Iron Extended Enterprise Edition allows you to virtualize one or more nodes. The number of nodes you can manage is processor-dependent, and varies with the license you have purchased. Virtual Iron requires a single management server linked to one or more physical servers, or nodes, on an Ethernet network. Virtual Iron's management server, Virtualization Manager, communicates with each node over a dedicated management network. Nodes managed in this framework may also access SAN and network resources via one or more public networks.

Management Server Minimum Requirements
One server hosts the Virtual Iron VI-Center, the management application that supports the actions you will perform when installing, configuring and using Virtual Iron. Minimum requirements include:

  • 1 CPU
  • 2 GB RAM
  • 30 GB hard drive
  • 2 Ethernet ports
  • Any x86 server that is running one of the following operating systems:
    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 or 5 32-bit and 64-bit (Note: 64-bit RHEL-4 requires the compat-arch-support package)
    • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 or 10 32- and 64-bit
    • Windows Server 2003 32-bit
    • CentOS 4 or 5

Node Minimum Requirements

  • 2 GB RAM
  • 2 Ethernet ports
  • Your virtualized nodes must have Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) or AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) hardware assist.

LiveConvert Requirements

  • 32-bit Windows 2000 Server (SP4)
  • 32-bit Windows 2000 Advanced Server (SP4)
  • 32-bit Windows 2003 Server
  • 32-bit Windows 2003 Server R2
  • 32-bit Windows XP Professional (SP2)

Single Server Edition, Minimum Requirements

  • 2 GB RAM
  • CD-ROM drive
  • 36 GB hard drive
  • 1 Ethernet port
  • Your virtualized nodes must have Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) or AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) hardware assist