After a long beta testing Virtual Iron finally published the 3.0 release of its virtualization platform.
This new release is highly expected for 2 reasons:
- the Xen open source hypervisor is now the underlying virtualization engine
- Virtual Iron offers a free of charge version of the platform even for business deployments
Virtual Iron 3.0 is offered in 3 edition, with different capabilities and licensing:
- Professional Edition
supports partitioning and basic management of a single Virtualized Node (max. 2 sockets) and is available at no charge - Consolidation Edition
supports server partitioning and basic management for multi-server configuration and support - Enterprise Edition
enables server partitioning for multi-server configuration and advanced management capabilities for rapid provisioning, high availability (LiveMigrate, LiveRecovery), disaster recovery (LiveRecovery), workload management and policy-based automation (LiveCapacity)
Virtual Iron also offers download of open source modified software for this version here.
In any case the product requires a new generation CPU from AMD or Intel among following:
- Intel Xeon 5000 or 7000 series
- Intel Core Duo T2000 series
- AMD Opteron 2200 or 8200 series
The product supports only 2 guest OSes:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 V2 (both 32 and 64bits)
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP3 (both 32 and 64bits)
but Windows guest OS support is expected in the upcoming Virtual Iron 3.1 version, available in beta in the coming months.
All editions feature a remote deployable Virtualization Manager, powered by a web interface and capability to create and configure virtual machines, perform administrative tasks like backup and restore, investigate real hardware configuration and statistics, etc. in a manual or scheduled way (through a policy system).
Downlad Virtual Iron 3.0 Professional Edition free of charge here.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.