Virtual Iron To Embrace Sun Galaxy Servers, Microsoft Windows

Virtual Iron has joined Sun Microsystems’ Partner Advantage Program and plans to offer its platform on Microsoft Windows next summer.

The Lowell, Mass.-based company, which develops advanced data-center virtualization and management software for Linux, recently announced support for Sun's new x64-based Galaxy servers based on AMD processors. By joining the Sun Partner Advantage Program, Virtual Iron aims to provide its resellers and Sun VARs with better tools to support product porting, migration, technical assistance and joint marketing opportunities.

Sun and Virtual Iron recently announced support for Xen, an open-source virtualization engine that has quickly established itself as the leading product in the open-source and Linux world.

Virtual Iron offers full data-center virtualization capabilities and, like VMware's VirtualCenter, advanced services for managing virtualized resources. For example, by using the platform, customers and partners can virtualize server, storage and network resources and use policy-based management to automatically provision resources to enterprise-class Linux applications running on Sun Fire x4100 and X4200 servers.

Currently, the platform runs on Linux only but will be offered on Windows next summer, Virtual Iron executives said.

"The new Sun Galaxy servers are gaining currency in the power user community, and we've been asked to certify [our software] on these new boxes," said Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron. "It has relevance to our resellers and Sun's VAR community.

Last year, Virtual Iron announced a round of funding led by Intel and the availability of Version 2.0 of its software with support for AMD Opteron and IBM BladeCenter servers.