A Satisfied Virtual Iron Customer
I recently asked for feedback from anyone using Virtual Iron (VI) in a production environment. I got the following comments from Tanya Morton, the IT director for a child services entity:
"We deployed VI in January and migrated 12 of our servers onto the platform. In the past four months, each node has locked up once, taking the virtualized servers on it down, as well, with no automatic move to a different node - VI is still trying to figure out what happened.. Aside from that, I have been very pleased, and certainly appreciate the much lower price tag."
I followed up with Tanya and asked if the lockups resulted in any lost data. Here's what she said:
"No, we didn't lose anything except uptime. As soon as I identified that a node was down, I was able to migrate the VMs to a different node and bring them right up. I haven't lost any data; I think my issues are actually with the Virtual Manager, but that is by no means an expert opinion."
We have a review of three commercial server consolidation products -- VMware ESX, Virtual Iron and XenServer (Citrix) -- coming up in our May/June issue. Our reviewer, Peter Varhol, liked VI, saying it does about 80 percent of what VMware does, for less money (get a free subscription here).
It sounds like Tanya's happy with her VI environment. I'd love to post more comments from readers about their experiences with their virtualization solutions. Please e-mail me and tell me your story.
Posted by Keith Ward on 05/15/2008 at 12:48 PM