Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management software, will support the latest Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 7300 series platforms. With the launch of its latest release, Virtual Iron is among the first virtualization software solutions to commercially support the new Intel Xeon processor.

Though virtualization has been around a long time in the mainframe world — in the x86 world it is called server virtualization. Reduced to simplest terms virtualization enables taking servers, dedicated to single workloads, to a single operating system — perhaps a print server, a web mail server, a database server — and consolidating them all into just one server.

This has become important because people are running out of space in their data centers and are looking for more efficiency. As people move their workloads to less expensive and smaller x86 servers, they need more power in them so the can simultaneously handle multiple workloads.

One answers lies in dual- and quad-core processor platforms such as the Intel Xeon processor 7300 quad core platform and Virtual Iron's Version 4 virtualization and virtual management software. Together, they can optimize utilization of a multiple-core architecture.

Virtual Iron users acquire improved virtualization performance with less overhead for the most demanding workloads on the new Intel platform. For instance, Virtual Iron provides up to 128 gigabytes of memory per physical server as well as the ability to perform symmetric multiprocessing when users take advantage of up to eight CPUs in a single virtual machine.

"By combining effective virtualization software with a quad-core such as the Intel Xeon processor 7300 quad core platform, users can carve up their server into multiple pieces and actually have a Linux workload sitting next to a Windows workload operating side-by-side on the same server — securely protecting, one from another," said John Kelly, director of product marketing at Virtual Iron Software.

This means that data centers that used to require five to six servers are perhaps now running only one. And what goes hand-in-hand with virtualization and multiple-core processors are savings in hardware, space, cooling and energy costs.

Concludes Kelly, "Our version 4 clearly takes great advantage of the latest advances in quad core — we are really one of the first to do that."

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