Features and Capabilities
The Virtual Iron solution consists of three components:
- VI - Center 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.
Technology & Architecture
Virtual Iron is a server virtualization and management solution that transforms the data center into an efficient pool of shared computing resources that are dynamically configured and managed via software. Server virtualization supports the creation of multiple virtual machines on a physical server by abstracting the physical hardware from the virtual resources. A virtual machine has a set of virtual resources - including CPU, memory, network, and storage - that works just like a traditional physical server.
The key technical benefits of server virtualization are:
- Isolation: A virtual machine's state is unaffected by the state of other virtual machines on the same physical hardware
- Encapsulation: The state of a virtual machines can be captured and files representing a virtual machine are portable
- Hardware-independence: Virtual hardware doesn't have to be identical to the underlying physical hardware
Server virtualization reduces capital costs through server consolidation and increases the flexibility with which the workloads can be matched with physical resources. Workloads can be run anywhere, allowing business-driven policies to deliver resources based on priority, cost and service-level requirements.
How it Works: Native Virtualization
At the core of Virtual Iron's virtualization platform is the Xen open source hypervisor. A hypervisor is a very low-level application that allows multiple virtual machines, consisting of an operating system and applications, to share physical resources. Each virtual machine appears to control the physical CPUs, memory and other resources all to itself. However, the hypervisor actually controls the resources, allocating what is needed to each virtual machine in turn.
Virtual Iron Virtualization services manage virtual infrastructure running on a physical server. They are designed to be:
- Secure: Extremely compact with no external access except through the VI-Center.
- Reliable: Based on the Novell Suse Linux kernel and device drivers.
- Scalable: LiveProvisioning automatic deployment option with no software to install or manage on each host server.
Virtualization services are designed to be used and accessed remotely by the VI-Center via the management network. This includes control and information access to the Service Partition. In addition, most services for a virtualized environment are also remotely accessible.
Network and storage I/O are virtualized to allow virtual servers to share physical connections to external networks while preserving security. Virtualization services export a subset of the devices to the unmodified guest operating systems based on the virtual server's configuration. Guest operating systems can use either emulated devices or accelerated drivers for I/O.
Virtual Iron's VI-Center provides a central place to control and automate virtual resources. It is a Java application with a client-server architecture and a high performance distributed object oriented database. The user interface uses a transactional job-based model to provide fault tolerant workflows with rollback. The VI-Center's built-in policy engine and event monitor allow users to customize the environment to optimize application performance, ensure availability, and simplify resource management. A remote virtual desktop provides graphical console, keyboard and mouse without client or server-side additions.
VI-Center provides the following capabilities:
- Physical infrastructure: Physical hardware discovery, bare metal provisioning, configuration, control, and monitoring
- Virtual Infrastructure: Virtual environment creation and hierarchy, visual status dashboards, access controls
- Virtual Servers: Create, Manage, Stop, Start, Migrate, LiveMigrate
- Policy-based Automation: LiveCapacity™, LiveRecovery™, LiveMaintenance, Rules Engine, Statistics, Event Monitor, Custom policies
- Reports: Resource utilization, System events
Please contact us for more information.