Bake-off: 4 Virtualization Suites (In One Review!)

Virtual iron Enterprise Edition
Open-source economics and recent hardware processor technologies such as Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) and AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) allows companies like Virtual Iron to compete with more established virtualization players.

While Virtual Iron's products can perform many of the same functions as VMware's offering—Virtual Iron utilizes open-source Xen hypervisor technology—engineers could not use it to build simple workflows, a key feature for any large development team.

Typically, hypervisors only provide a minimal layer for OSes to run as VMs. Similarly, Virtual Iron's control partition has the bare-bones components necessary to support virtualization.

Virtual Iron finds more value building new management solutions rather than inventing hypervisor technologies. That's why the company uses XenSource's hypervisor. According to Virtual Iron, customers are more willing to buy ready-made solutions, such as disaster recovery and virtual desktops built on top of a virtualization technology, because they can get immediate value from these systems.

Virtual Iron also supports live migrations, allowing users to switch VMs without any physical downtime. Virtual Iron used to enjoy an advantage in this area over XenSource, but that has disappeared now that it supports live migrations as well.

Virtual Iron promotes live migration for data center load-balancing and maintenance. For instance, physical servers running at maximum capacity can be off-loaded quickly by moving VMs to other physical servers.

Like VMware, Virtual Iron can run 32-bit and 64-bit OSes side by side. Virtual Iron supports a host of hardware products, such as iSCSI, VLAN switches and SAN disks, but primarily needs Intel VT or AMD-V to work.

Virtual Iron's Virtualization Manager arrives with many configuration options. Administrators can assign network adapters to VLAN networks, add storage from local disks, iSCSI disks or Fibre Channel disks and select multiple memory configurations. Other configurations, such as booting from PXE or CD-ROM, also are available.

Virtual Iron uses policies to coordinate sets of features. For instance, a policy called Live Recovery allows administrators to move virtual servers to other nodes if a current node goes offline. If power fails, a backup server can bring up all the virtual servers in their previous states without setting up clustering software. Policies allow automation of many high-level tasks. Administrators can activate policies to rebalance virtual data centers and restart virtual servers.

Developers can use the Virtualization Manager to start new or cloned virtual servers. They can also import or export applications into virtual hard disks. Open-source developers can find prebuilt appliances, such as a LAMP stack, and import them right into a virtual server.

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