Virtual Iron 4.2 released

Virtual Iron 4.2 has officially been released. Virtual Iron uses the Xen Hypervisor and positioned their product “Virtual Iron Enterprise Edition” as a competitor of VMware ESX. This new release includes a couple of long awaited features:

• VS Tools support for the following additional operating systems: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 32-bit and 64-bit, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 32-bit and 64-bit
• Multi-pathing for virtual server Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks to support business continuity and redundancy.
• LiveSnapshotTM, which provides logical disk and virtual server snapshots for hot backup and patch management. These capabilities enable off-loaded, space efficient, and no-downtime backups on live virtual machines running in production and development environments.
• The packaging of VSTools as an ISO, which appears to the Administrator as a virtual CD ROM, to further simplify deployments and upgrades.
• A significant reduction in node boot and discovery times when there are large numbers of iSCSI physical disks.
• Increased storage on demand with support for the dynamic addition of physical disks to a disk group, which can also now contain more than one physical disk.

Unfotunately they have not resolved the performance issues with several 3com nics and there still no option for nic teaming, which makes it less suitable for enterprise virtualisation at this moment in my opinion. But with this pace of releasing VMware should definitely watch Virtual Iron close. If you want to try out Virtual Iron visit their website.