IT reseller takeaway: VMware is currently the virtualization industry giant, but other vendors are starting to present it with some competition. Both Virtual Iron and Xensource present viable virtualization alternatives and their products may be better for certain customers. The tip, which was excerpted from our sister site SearchVirtualization.com, covers Virtual Iron new virtualization platform, Iron v4.
Virtual Iron Software Inc. of Lowell, Mass., has upped the revision number of its eponymous virtualization platform to version 4. The latest version builds on the 64-bit Xen 3.1 open source code from XenSource Inc.., integrating support for Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 kernel and drivers, offering a new management console, and adding new physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) migration capabilities.
As far as new features in Virtual Iron, Grandinetti cited the integration of Novell SLES 10 as particularly important. With it, Virtual Iron now uses the SLES kernel and drivers in its service console, or dom0 in Xen-speak. "What customers have been telling us is that they feel more comfortable if all the hardware in their infrastructure is certified and supported by a major vendor," he said. "People in IT departments really don't have a sense of humor about this; their jobs depend on it."
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