Virtual Iron

Virtual Iron software ran unmodified 32-bit and 64-bit guest operating systems 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.

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 hypervisor. The virtualization manager (VI-Center), a Java-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.

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 or Fibre Channel 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 boot any server that was connected and correctly configured (for PXE boot).