Virtual Iron Scrapped!

The acquisition of Virtual Iron was announced by Oracle on the 13th May this year. Oracle already had its own OracleVM product and can now add Sun's xVM software to the pot. Both of those products are (like Virtual Iron) based on open source Xen.

While this consolidation is good for customers in the long term, providing 3 strong competitors to the incumbent VMware, in the short term it was hard to see Oracle maintaining so many similar components to their stack. Sure enough something had to give and last week Oracle wrote to partners confirming that there would be no new sales of Virtual Iron, and that its features would eventually be subsumed into OracleVM. Virtual Iron customers should update themselves on the situation here.

Although we have already been contacted by an unhappy Virtual Iron customer looking to mitigate the risks in operating a platform whose development has been ceased, at least Oracle made their decision to melt-down Virtual Iron quickly, limiting any uncertainty.

If you are a Virtual Iron customer, and need to migrate to a supported, Xen-based platform with a future. We can make the transition as painless as possible. Given that most Virtual Iron customers have tight cost constraints, we are currently recommending Citrix XenServer as a replacement. There is even a completely free version that offers enterprise features like live migration, shared storage integration, and OS templates.

During this difficult period, we offer a free consultation with one of our engineers, to scope the size and shape of any possible migration from Virtual Iron to XenServer, or to consider other options. Simply get in touch.