Virtual Iron Solutions from Promark Technology

Founded in 2003, Virtual Iron provides cost-effective, production-ready server virtualization software for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The solutions deliver comparable capabilities to VMware without the cost and complexity. The company is led by an experienced management team and backed by top-tier investors including Highland Capital, Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital and SAP Ventures.

Virtual Iron leverages the latest advances in hardware-assisted virtualization and open source to optimize performance and reduce virtualization overhead. Users deploy Virtual Iron's solutions to address a variety of data center issues including server consolidation, development & test optimization, high availability and disaster recovery, dynamic capacity management and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

The server virtualization market is experiencing rapid growth today, but current market penetration of the market is still less than 10 percent. The three biggest obstacles to adoption are complexity, cost, and installation difficulty according to industry analysts. Virtual Iron addresses this gap by providing users with all the benefits of production-class server virtualization without the cost and complexity. Companies of all sizes, and especially small and medium size enterprises (SME), now have an honest choice for production-class server virtualization and are turning to Virtual Iron because its easier to use and easier to afford.

In many cases, virtualization is deployed as part of a larger initiative that may involve a data center assessment, a hardware refresh, physical to virtual migration, business continuity and disaster recovery planning, capacity planning, and policy-based automation. Because of this, Virtual Iron has adopted a 100% channel distribution strategy for its business. This approach makes it easier for our customers to buy complete solutions from our value-added channel partners. These may include servers, storage area networks, storage software and professional services as part of their server virtualization initiative. The company is also well recognized by the industry and partners with most of the major processor, hardware, operating system and other infrastructure vendors, including AMD, Compellent, Dell, EqualLogic, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Novell, PlateSpin and Sun.

True Server Virtualization and Management for Everyone

Virtual Iron is a server virtualization & virtual infrastructure management solution. The product offers comparable capabilities and performance to established offerings and is easy to deploy, use and manage.

By taking full advantage of industry standards and open source economics, Virtual Iron dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of virtualization and for the first time, makes production-ready capabilities available to the mainstream market.

A Comprehensive Virtualization Solution

Virtual Iron provides true server virtualization:

Operating system independent, supporting a wide range of industry standard platforms
Mobility, allowing virtual machines to move between physical servers without any downtime
Advanced features, such as built-in solutions for virtual machine high availability and capacity-based management
Reporting and analysis, to allow you to know what is happening in your environment, when, and by whom

For everyone:

Ecosystem friendly, Virtual Iron doesn't put proprietary technologies between you and the rest of your data center infrastructure. Existing solutions, such as storage, backups, and management, continue to work.
Cost effective, at a fraction of the total cost of alternative solutions, and substantially more efficient than a traditional data center.
Easy to acquire, through a large network of value added resellers.

With Virtual Iron, users can:

Virtualize enterprise-class workloads running on unmodified Windows and Linux operating systems.
Improve the utilization of current systems to reduce power, space and cooling issues through server consolidation.
Quickly set up development, test and production environments. Recover from failures quickly, reliably and cost-efficiently.
Match resource capacity to workload demands automatically.
Reduce human labor and errors via policy-based management.

The Virtual Iron solution consists of three components:

Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager provides a central place to control and automate virtual resources. It streamlines tasks that are normally highly manual and time-intensive and significantly reduces data center costs and complexity.
Virtual Iron Virtualization Services are deployed automatically on bare-metal, industry-standard servers without requiring software installation or management. These features streamline data center management and reduce operational costs.
Open Source Virtualization, based on an open source hypervisor derived from the open source community project, is the first software loaded when the physical server boots. The hypervisor manages all hardware resources and leverages the hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities built into Intel and AMD processors to create an abstraction layer between physical hardware and virtual resources

Virtualization Platform

Feature	Benefit
LiveProvisioning	A "zero touch" automated deployment capability that eliminates the need for physical installation or management of virtualization software on physical servers.
Virtual Storage Management	Create virtual storage on the fly from local, fibre channel or iSCSI storage servers.
Virtual Network Management	Create virtual switches that allow virtual machines to use standard networks or vLANs transparently.
Virtual Machine Creation Wizard	Use the virtual machine create wizard to simply create virtual infrastructure by cloning existing templates or creating new servers: Up to 8 CPUs Up to 32 GB RAM Up to 5 NICs with unique MAC addresses Scheduling priority Resource throttling
LiveMigration	Migrate workloads from one physical server to another, for example to provide additional capacity, without any application downtime.
LiveCapacity	LiveCapacity optimizes virtual machine performance and data center utilization. It accomplishes this by rebalancing nodes by moving virtual machines when the node's CPU utilization is above a threshold.
LiveRecovery	LiveRecovery automates virtual machine recovery from physical hardware failures without the cost and complexity of clustering software. Virtual machines can be automatically restarted on new hardware when physical hardware fails, reducing outage duration and operational costs.
LiveMaintenance	LiveMaintenance automates the process of taking a physical server out of service for maintenance, such as adding more physical memory, without impacting the virtual machines running on it. LiveMaintenance uses LiveMigrate to move virtual machines - without stopping operating systems or applications - to other nodes in the virtual data center.
LiveSnapshot	LiveSnapshot creates space-efficient point in time images of running or stopped virtual machines. LiveSnapshot makes it easy to try patches and roll back to previous states, or backup a running virtual machine.
LiveConvert	An automated software solution powered by PlateSpin that enables customers to easily migrate workloads (data, applications and operating systems) from physical, virtual and image-based infrastructures. LiveConvert provides Virtual Iron users with the ability to quickly migrate workloads between physical servers and virtual machines allowing users to quickly achieve the benefits of large-scale server consolidation.
Jobs and Reports	View historical information on system performance or administrative actions in the data center. Useful for capacity planning, billing and 404 auditing.
User-based Access Control	Perform user management locally or connect with Microsoft Active Directory or LDAP servers. Prevent unauthorized users from using the system. Monitor changes based on user actions for compliance purposes.

Extended Enterprise Edition

Virtual Iron Extended Enterprise Edition provides the most advanced server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management capabilities available at a fraction of the cost.

Unlimited virtual Servers
Virtual SMP
Local, iSCSI, FC storage
VLAN
LiveMigration
LiveMaintenance
LiveRecovery
LiveCapacity
Novell SLES 10 kernel & drivers
LiveConvert powered by PlateSpin-6 P2V
V2V conversion per socket
Gold, Platinum support available

Product Overview
Virtual Iron Software enables organizations to transform their physical server, storage, and network resources into a centrally managed pool for creating and managing virtual infrastructure in the data center.

Intel-Virtual Iron Solution Overview
Virtualization helps organizations cut costs, optimize operations and ensure high system availability.

Simplicity Drives Innovation: Intel and Virtual Iron
Virtual Iron's virtual server management software builds on Intel Virtualization Technology.

Business Continuity
Virtualization as Part of a Business Continuity Strategy.