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Virtual Iron Software within the next three months will roll out a version of its data center virtualization software that will support Intels chip-level virtualization technology.
The Lowell, Mass.-based company will demo the software next week at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, said Mike Grandinetti, vice president and chief marketing officer for Virtual Iron.
Grandinetti said Virtual Iron has been working with the Intel Virtualization Technology for more than six months as it readied its Virtual Center Platform virtualization product and Data Center Manager to support the on-chip capabilities.
The chip maker, through its investment arm, Intel Capital, was the lead investor in Virtual Irons $8.5 million Series C capital campaign last year. Having such a close relationship with Intel gave Virtual Iron a head start on some of its competitors in working with Intels virtualization technology, Grandinetti said.
“It gave us early access to their technology, ahead of the rest of the industry,” he said.
Virtualization enables users to run multiple operating systems and workloads on a single physical server by creating virtual machines. Virtual Irons technology helps virtualize data center resources, including servers, I/O and storage, and manage those virtualized environments.
Both Intel and rival Advanced Micro Devices are arming their next round of processors with on-chip virtualization capabilities designed to help make virtualization software from the likes of Virtual Iron, VMware and SWsoft run better and more efficiently.
Intel already has put its virtualization technology in some of its chips, and will outfit the rest—including its upcoming “Montecito” Itanium processor —this year. AMD will introduce its AMD Virtualization Technology in its next generation of chips in the middle of this year.
Virtual Iron also will support AMDs technology, Grandinetti said.
Intels on-chip capabilities will virtualize the entire Intel instruction set, taking that load off the hypervisor virtualization software, Grandinetti said. That will improve the performance of the virtualization software, he said.
“[Customers] want to run larger and larger workloads on their virtual machines, but they need better performance to do it,” Grandinetti said.
The hardware-enabled virtualization also will enable both 32- and 64-bit operating system and application support, and will lead to smaller and less complex hypervisor software, he said.
Grandinetti said the Intel partnership is only the latest in a string of agreements the company has made with technology leaders. In February, the company announced that its virtualization software now ships with Novells SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 OS. The month before, Virtual Iron joined Sun Microsystems Partner Advantage Program.