Virtual Iron

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Virtual Iron
Fateacquired by Oracle Corporation
Headquarters
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United States  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Virtual Iron Software, was located in Lowell, Massachusetts, sold proprietary software for virtualization and management of a virtual infrastructure. Co-founded by Alex Vasilevsky, [1] Virtual Iron figured among the first companies to offer virtualization software to fully support Intel VT-x and AMD-V hardware-assisted virtualization. [2]

Contents

As of May  2009 Oracle Corporation agreed to acquire Virtual Iron Software, Inc., subject to customary closing conditions. Oracle now declines to offer any updates or patches for current customers, even updates and patches developed before the purchase. [3] On June 19, 2009, The Register reported that Oracle had killed the Virtual Iron product. [4]

Virtual Iron platform

Virtual Iron software ran unmodified 32-bit and 64-bit guest operating systems with near-native performance[ citation needed ]. A virtualization manager offered access to control, automate, modify and monitor virtual resources. Virtualization services were automatically deployed on supported hardware without additional software. The platform was based on the open source Xen hypervisor. [5] Virtual Iron, like other virtualization software, provided server consolidation, business continuity and capacity management. [6]

The Virtual Iron platform consisted of a virtualization manager, virtualization servers and a hypervisor. The virtualization manager (VI-Center), a Java-based application, allowed for central management of the virtualized servers. A physical server could have many virtualized servers, which ran as unmodified guest operating systems.

Virtual Iron could use both physical-storage or virtual-storage access models. However, the use of a virtual-storage access model leveraged SAN storage to create a fault-tolerant iSCSI or Fibre Channel based cluster of virtual nodes. The VI Center installed on both Windows and Linux. After installation, the administrator had to configure a "management network" for the purpose of communicating with nodes in the cluster. The VI Center used the management network to PXE boot any server that was connected and correctly configured (for PXE boot).

The included LiveRecovery tool could configure high availability. Additionally, CPU or power-consumption load-balancing was configurable using the LiveCapacity or LivePower tools respectively. Additional features included disk and virtual machine cloning (snapshots), IPMI/ILO support, etc.

"Native virtualization"

Virtual Iron had implemented full virtualization (requiring hardware-assisted virtualization which it called native virtualization) over paravirtualization. Native virtualization allowed for unmodified guest operating systems and had the advantage of hardware advances for better performance. Virtual Iron, Inc claimed to have pioneered the implementation of native virtualization. [7] Virtual Iron discussed paravirtualization and native virtualization in its blog:

Virtual Iron has decided against paravirtualization in favor of "native virtualization." With hardware advances coming out of Intel and AMD, we see native virtualization capable of matching physical hardware performance without any of the complexity and engineering efforts involved in paravirtualizing an OS. From our discussions with a broad range of users, they simply do not want to roll out modified OSs unless the trade-off is heavily in their favor. This Faustian trade-off is no longer necessary. [8]

See also

Related Research Articles

Xen Type-1 hypervisor

Xen is a type-1 hypervisor, providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently. It was originally developed by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and is now being developed by the Linux Foundation with support from Intel, Citrix, Arm Ltd, Huawei, AWS, Alibaba Cloud, AMD, Bitdefender and epam.

x86 virtualization is the use of hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities on an x86/x86-64 CPU.

A hypervisor is a kind of emulator; it is computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called a host machine, and each virtual machine is called a guest machine. The hypervisor presents the guest operating systems with a virtual operating platform and manages the execution of the guest operating systems. Multiple instances of a variety of operating systems may share the virtualized hardware resources: for example, Linux, Windows, and macOS instances can all run on a single physical x86 machine. This contrasts with operating-system–level virtualization, where all instances must share a single kernel, though the guest operating systems can differ in user space, such as different Linux distributions with the same kernel.

In computing, paravirtualization or para-virtualization is a virtualization technique that presents a software interface to the virtual machines which is similar, yet not identical to the underlying hardware–software interface.

QEMU Free virtualization and emulation software

QEMU is a free and open-source hypervisor. It emulates the machine's processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest operating systems. It can interoperate with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to run virtual machines at near-native speed. QEMU can also do emulation for user-level processes, allowing applications compiled for one architecture to run on another.

Platform virtualization software, specifically emulators and hypervisors, are software packages that emulate the whole physical computer machine, often providing multiple virtual machines on one physical platform. The table below compares basic information about platform virtualization hypervisors.

In computing, hardware-assisted virtualization is a platform virtualization approach that enables efficient full virtualization using help from hardware capabilities, primarily from the host processors. A full virtualization is used to emulate a complete hardware environment, or virtual machine, in which an unmodified guest operating system effectively executes in complete isolation. Hardware-assisted virtualization was added to x86 processors in 2005 and 2006 (respectively).

Input–output memory management unit

In computing, an input–output memory management unit (IOMMU) is a memory management unit (MMU) that connects a direct-memory-access–capable (DMA-capable) I/O bus to the main memory. Like a traditional MMU, which translates CPU-visible virtual addresses to physical addresses, the IOMMU maps device-visible virtual addresses to physical addresses. Some units also provide memory protection from faulty or malicious devices.

The following is a timeline of virtualization development. In computing, virtualization is the use of a computer to simulate another computer. Through virtualization, a host simulates a guest by exposing virtual hardware devices, which may be done through software or by allowing access to a physical device connected to the machine.

Full virtualization Computing technique involving instances of an environment

In computer science, virtualization is a modern technique developed in late 1990s and is different from simulation and emulation. Virtualization employs techniques used to create instances of an environment, as opposed to simulation, which models the environment; or emulation, which replicates the target environment such as certain kinds of virtual machine environments. Full virtualization requires that every salient feature of the hardware be reflected into one of several virtual machines – including the full instruction set, input/output operations, interrupts, memory access, and whatever other elements are used by the software that runs on the bare machine, and that is intended to run in a virtual machine. In such an environment, any software capable of execution on the raw hardware can be run in the virtual machine and, in particular, any operating systems. The obvious test of full virtualization is whether an operating system intended for stand-alone use can successfully run inside a virtual machine.

VirtualBox Open-source x86 virtualization application

Oracle VM VirtualBox is a type-2 hypervisor for x86 virtualization developed by Oracle Corporation.

Hardware virtualization is the virtualization of computers as complete hardware platforms, certain logical abstractions of their componentry, or only the functionality required to run various operating systems. Virtualization hides the physical characteristics of a computing platform from the users, presenting instead an abstract computing platform. At its origins, the software that controlled virtualization was called a "control program", but the terms "hypervisor" or "virtual machine monitor" became preferred over time.

Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, and briefly known before its release as Windows Server Virtualization, is a native hypervisor; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. Starting with Windows 8, Hyper-V superseded Windows Virtual PC as the hardware virtualization component of the client editions of Windows NT. A server computer running Hyper-V can be configured to expose individual virtual machines to one or more networks. Hyper-V was first released with Windows Server 2008, and has been available without additional charge since Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. A standalone Windows Hyper-V Server is free, but with command-line interface only.

Sun xVM was a product line from Sun Microsystems that addressed virtualization technology on x86 platforms. One component was discontinued before the Oracle acquisition of Sun; the remaining two continue under Oracle branding.

An embedded hypervisor is a hypervisor that supports the requirements of embedded systems.

libvirt Management tool

libvirt is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization technologies. These APIs are widely used in the orchestration layer of hypervisors in the development of a cloud-based solution.

Second Level Address Translation (SLAT), also known as nested paging, is a hardware-assisted virtualization technology which makes it possible to avoid the overhead associated with software-managed shadow page tables.

Founded by Alex Vasilevsky, Virtual Computer is a venture-backed software company in the Boston area that produces desktop virtualization products, which combine centralized management with local execution on a hypervisor running on PCs. Virtual Computer has developed a type-1 hypervisor that runs directly on end-user PCs, delivering native PC performance and mobility. By running the workload on the PC, Virtual Computer enables companies to have centralized management without servers, storage, and networking required for server-hosted VDI. The technology supports shared image management, enabling an IT professional to manage thousands of desktops and laptops the same way that they would manage one.

GPU virtualization refers to technologies that allow the use of a GPU to accelerate graphics or GPGPU applications running on a virtual machine. GPU virtualization is used in various applications such as desktop virtualization, cloud gaming and computational science.

In computing, a system virtual machine is a virtual machine that provides a complete system platform and supports the execution of a complete operating system (OS). These usually emulate an existing architecture, and are built with the purpose of either providing a platform to run programs where the real hardware is not available for use, or of having multiple instances of virtual machines leading to more efficient use of computing resources, both in terms of energy consumption and cost effectiveness, or both. A VM was originally defined by Popek and Goldberg as "an efficient, isolated duplicate of a real machine".

References

  1. "Virtual computer co-founder, CTO Vasilevsky dies". Bizjournals.com. Retrieved 2021-11-28.
  2. Burt, Jeffrey (March 1, 2006). "Virtual Iron to Support Intel Virtualization Tech". Eweek.com. Retrieved 2007-01-16.
  3. "Oracle Buys Virtual Iron". Oracle.com. May 13, 2009. Retrieved 2009-05-13.
  4. "Oracle kills Virtual Iron-ware". Theregister.co.uk. June 19, 2009. Retrieved 2009-06-21.
  5. "Xen startup Virtual Iron breaks ranks on paravirtualization". Searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com. September 21, 2006. Retrieved 2007-04-03.
  6. Hernandez, Pedro (December 11, 2006). "Luring Virtual Workloads to Virtual Iron". Enterpriseitplanet.com. Retrieved 2007-01-16.
  7. MacKinnon, Chris A. (June 9, 2006). "The Virtually Run Data Center: Run Any Application Anywhere, Anytime". Processor. 28 (23): 31. Retrieved 2007-01-16.
  8. "Paravirtualization is a Dead-End Approach". virtualiron.com. July 7, 2006. Retrieved 2007-01-16.