Virtual Iron Software announced Version 4.2 of its product. With the new release, Virtual Iron responds to the increased use of its platform in production environments and in support of advanced virtualization use cases such as disaster recovery, high availability and dynamic capacity management. The release, which includes several industry firsts, will be generally available in late December.

Virtual Iron Version 4.2 is the first Xen-based server virtualization solution to include:

• Multi-pathing for virtual server Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks to support business continuity and redundancy.
  
• LiveSnapshot - virtual server snapshots for hot backup and patch management. These capabilities enable offloaded, space efficient and no-downtime backups on live virtual machines running in production environments and also reduce the time for virtual machine patching in development and test processes.
  
• The ability to dynamically increase the size of both disk groups and virtual disks – providing increased storage on demand.

The release also adds other new capabilities including:

• Broader OS support, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, to meet demand for mainstream, production use.
  
• Packaged Virtual Server tools as an ISO, which appears to the administrator as a virtual CD ROM, to further simplify deployments and upgrades.

“Mobility and availability are two of the most important criteria that end users look to in virtualized environments,” said Mark Bowker, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Virtual Iron has focused on providing the software and tools with these considerations in mind. The Virtual Iron 4.2 software suite provides these critical capabilities as part of an enterprise-class virtualization infrastructure solution that deliver benefits to data center and test environments of all sizes and across all industries.”

The server virtualization software market is expected to grow to as much as $7B in 2011 from $800M in 2006. Current penetration of virtualization on installed x86 servers is estimated at just 6% today. Virtual Iron provides easy-to-use, enterprise-class capabilities on its next generation architecture, significantly reducing the obstacles to mainstream market adoption. The platform combines the latest version of the Xen open source hypervisor with advanced virtualization services and policy-based automation capabilities such as LiveMigrate , LiveRecovery and LiveCapacity . It also features LiveProvisioning , a “zero touch” automated deployment capability that eliminates the need for physical installation or management of virtualization software on virtualized physical servers. Virtual Iron also takes full advantage of the latest processor-based, hardware–assisted virtualization capabilities including AMD Rapid Virtualization Indexing and Intel FlexPriority to deliver near native performance. Users leverage Virtual Iron to support a broad range of data center initiatives including server consolidation, development and test optimization, high availability and disaster recovery, capacity management and server hosted virtual desktops (VDI).

According to industry analyst IDC, there is an increasing demand for server virtualization solutions that can support advanced use cases such as high availability and disaster recovery. The research firm estimates that by 2010, over 60% of server virtualization deployments will support these types of initiatives, vs. just 12% in 2006. As this shift occurs, user benefits are also expanding beyond reduced hardware costs to include significant increases in manageability and flexibility in the data center.

“Well over half of our customers today are leveraging Virtual Iron’s comprehensive virtualization platform to support more advanced use cases such as disaster recovery and high availability,” said Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron Software. “Version 4.2 adds to these already robust capabilities to extend support for our many end users running demanding workloads in production environments while making Virtual Iron even easier to install, deploy and manage.”