Virtual Iron upgrades virtual infrastructure management product 11 August, 2008 By Paul Weinberg

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The LivePower feature optimizes power usage to provide cost savings by automatically turning on and off the power on virtual or physical servers based on power requirements at the time.

Courtesy of the inclusion of Intel Node Manager system administrators can monitor, allocate and manage power consumption on the servers based on workloads, wattage required and budget goals.

Virtual Iron and its channel partners will find it easier to make the business case for LivePower in cities and communities across North America experiencing restrictions on electric power, suggested Bill Moran, industry analyst and research director at Ptak, Noel & Associates.

This is a very much a regional play where the reseller must be sensitive to power requirements of local data center managers, he remarked.

"The problem is particularly acute for some data centers in areas where you go to the power company, and say 'I need more power', [and] they tell you we can't give you anymore power."

Moran suggested that Virtual Iron's reliance on the Intel load management solution is a plus in terms of offering something unique in the growing virtualization market.

The Intel feature is not yet available in VMware's product line, but this is where the server industry is headed because of regulators' pressures, with similar power management capability running on propriety IBM Power based systems, he remarked.

On the other hand, Virtual Iron's solution will be "problematic" if the end user customer has servers based on the competing AMD microprocessors, Moran noted.

Virtual Iron is going outside the saturated large enterprise market for virtualization that VMware has staked out and instead targeted mid-market organizations relying internally from 20 to 100 servers.

The company is saying to these types of clients that Virtual Iron's solution is easier to install and use compared to the more complex VMware product line, stated its director of corporate marketing, Tim Walsh.

"We just think there is an unmet need in the marketplace and the channel has not been able to sell a robust server virtualization product."

Virtual Iron's product which combines both the XenSource hypervisor and its virtualization management layers requires a one-time installation on a single server within a multi-physical server environment, Walsh explained. "Install the product once on one server, and it is set up for any load that you want to virtualize."

However, the fact that Virtual Iron is a separate product that has to be added to the server is a distinct disadvantage when major name brand servers are being embedded with the competing VMware ESXi hypervisor, said Bill Moran.

Also, he suggested that smaller customer with a few servers on hand will find even a supposedly simpler Virtual Iron solution is too complicated for them to set up. "These customers may not be able to manage a Virtual Iron solution because they haven't got much of a data center staff."

Finally, Virtual Iron is a small player that could get really squeezed in the race for the mid-market customer when a more powerful Microsoft finally comes on stream with a competitive and compelling virtualization product on the market -- Walsh's own estimate is that his company has an 18 month window before he and his executives are likely to face this challenge.

Moran suggested that one plus for Virtual Iron is that Microsoft has introduced flawed and incomplete products in the past, including its ill fated and "static" Microsoft Virtual Server which had limitations from a memory and storage perspective.

"I guess Virtual Iron and these other guys are praying that Microsoft has difficulties [in its ramp up]."