Virtual Iron Software, was located in

Lowell, Massachusetts Lowell () is a city in Massachusetts, in the United States. Alongside Cambridge, It is one of two traditional seats of Middlesex County. With an estimated population of 115,554 in 2020, it was the fifth most populous city in Massachusetts as of ...

, sold proprietary software for virtualization and management of a virtual infrastructure. Co-founded by Alex Vasilevsky, Virtual Iron figured among the first companies to offer virtualization software to fully support

Intel VT-x x86 virtualization is the use of hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities on an x86/x86-64 CPU. In the late 1990s x86 virtualization was achieved by complex software techniques, necessary to compensate for the processor's lack of hardware-as ...

and

AMD-V x86 virtualization is the use of hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities on an x86/x86-64 CPU. In the late 1990s x86 virtualization was achieved by complex software techniques, necessary to compensate for the processor's lack of hardware-as ...

hardware-assisted virtualization In computing, hardware-assisted virtualization is a platform virtualization approach that enables efficient full virtualization using help from hardware capabilities, primarily from the host processors. A full virtualization is used to emulate a c ...

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

agreed to acquire Virtual Iron Software, Inc., subject to customary closing conditions. Oracle now declines to offer any updates or patches for current customers, even updates and patches developed before the purchase. On June 19, 2009,

The Register ''The Register'' is a British technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee, John Lettice and Ross Alderson. The online newspaper's masthead sublogo is "''Biting the hand that feeds IT''." Their primary focus is information tec ...

reported that Oracle had killed the Virtual Iron product.

Virtual Iron platform

Virtual Iron software ran unmodified

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in 32-bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calculation ...

and

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit Integer (computer science), integers, memory addresses, or other Data (computing), data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing unit, CPUs and arithmetic logic unit, ALUs are those ...

guest

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s with near-native performance. A virtualization manager offered access to control, automate, modify and monitor virtual resources. Virtualization services were automatically deployed on supported hardware without additional software. The platform was based on the open source Xen

hypervisor A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is calle ...

. Virtual Iron, like other virtualization software, provided server consolidation, business continuity and capacity management. The Virtual Iron platform consisted of a virtualization manager, virtualization servers and a

. The virtualization manager (VI-Center), a

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

-based application, allowed for central management of the virtualized servers. A physical server could have many virtualized servers, which ran as unmodified guest

operating systems An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also inc ...

. Virtual Iron could use both physical-storage or virtual-storage access models. However, the use of a virtual-storage access model leveraged SAN storage to create a fault-tolerant

iSCSI Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI ( ) is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP ...

Fibre Channel Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to servers in storage area networks (SAN) in commercial data cen ...

based cluster of virtual nodes. The VI Center installed on both Windows and Linux. After installation, the administrator had to configure a "management network" for the purpose of communicating with nodes in the cluster. The VI Center used the management network to

PXE PXE may refer to: * Preboot Execution Environment, booting computers via a network * Proof and Experimental Establishment, an Indian defense laboratory * Pseudoxanthoma elasticum, a genetic disease * Pentium Extreme Edition, a variant of Pentium D ...

boot any server that was connected and correctly configured (for PXE boot). The included LiveRecovery tool could configure high availability. Additionally, CPU or power-consumption load-balancing was configurable using the LiveCapacity or LivePower tools respectively. Additional features included disk and virtual machine cloning (snapshots), IPMI/ILO support, etc.

"Native virtualization"

Virtual Iron had implemented

full virtualization In computer science, virtualization is a modern technique developed in late 1990s and is different from simulation and emulation. Virtualization employs techniques used to create instances of an environment, as opposed to simulation, which model ...

(requiring

which it called ''native virtualization'') over

paravirtualization In computing, paravirtualization or para-virtualization is a virtualization technique that presents a software interface to the virtual machines which is similar, yet not identical, to the underlying hardware–software interface. The intent o ...

. ''Native virtualization'' allowed for unmodified

guest operating system Hardware virtualization is the virtualization of computers as complete hardware platforms, certain logical abstractions of their componentry, or only the functionality required to run various operating systems. Virtualization hides the physic ...

s and had the advantage of hardware advances for better performance. Virtual Iron, Inc claimed to have pioneered the implementation of ''native virtualization''. Virtual Iron discussed paravirtualization and ''native virtualization'' in its blog:

Virtual Iron has decided against paravirtualization in favor of "native virtualization." With hardware advances coming out of Intel and AMD, we see native virtualization capable of matching physical hardware performance without any of the complexity and engineering efforts involved in paravirtualizing an OS. From our discussions with a broad range of users, they simply do not want to roll out modified OSs unless the trade-off is heavily in their favor. This Faustian trade-off is no longer necessary.

References

External links

Virtual Iron Home Page

Virtual Iron Virtualization News and Support and Training Resources
{{Oracle Defunct software companies of the United States Virtualization Companies established in 2003

Virtual Iron platform

"Native virtualization"

See also

References

External links