Virtual Iron
Check this webcast hosted by PlateSpin and Virtual Iron: Reducing Costs and Increasing Agility with Virtualization, and this interface demo. Unfortunately you have to sign up to see it, however it shows some similar stuff to the VI3 demo further down this blog. Virtual Iron is Xen based with some of their own additions, they have Live Migration and DR Migration working now, plus there management interface is very nice.
The one feature I think is perfect and I’ve thought about doing myself is PXE booting the computing nodes and having them join the computing cluster as a resource automagically. This is exactly the right idea. The hardware platform you are running on reduces down to just a software management system. No doubt within a few years server systems will start being designed with the option of a hypervisor as part of the bios. Some one clever could probably do it now with LinuxBios.
The Virtual Iron price structure is very similar to Xen, and beats VMware’s by a huge margin. 500USD plus 125USD per year vs 2875USD per socket plus 700USD per year.
Some other useful info on Virtual Iron:
- Virtualization Wars
- Does VMware Need to Nip/Tuck Its Prices?
- Virtual Iron’s LiveCapacity Explained
- Virtual Iron
- VMware for the common man: Virtual Iron offers enterprise-class virtualization suite for less
- XenSource, Virtual Iron Gun for VMware with Features, Low Prices
I’ve been deciding between VMWare and Xen recently for a server upgrade, but I think that Virtual Iron might be the right choice. Xen flexibility with VMWare’s features.
Technorati Tags: virtual iron, xen, vmware