According to The Register, Oracle is going to kill Virtual Iron fron the end of June 2009. Now, I’m not that surprised, there are a lot of Xen based virtualization products on the market. The only difference between them is the management software.

Now, I tested Virtual Iron in my project and found it to be too unstable for use in a production environment. The management node came out of sync with the compute nodes and made it necessary to kill the database and start over. Another problem was the lack of VLAN support for iSCSI. You can read my evolution in my report.

That being said, Virtual Iron had one of the nicest ways of deploying its virtualization software: Install the management node, PXE boot the compute node and it would automatically show up in the management interface. Add a compute node to a cluster and it would inherit all the necessary settings. Bye bye to single node configuration.

Hopefully, Oracle or someone else will take some of Virtual Iron’s ideas and implement them in another software package. I would certainly see their deployment strategy used in VMware vCenter or Sun xVM – deployment of a large number of hosts are much easier if all the necessary software is automatically installed and all the settings are inherited from the mangement node.

Right now, VMware only offer host profiles that are not that easy to understand due to their point-and-click interface. Another problem is iSCSI deployment and IP management on their VMKernel interfaces.

Virtual Iron had some clever solutions. I certainly will not miss Virtual Iron, but some competition is good for the customers. Competition is also necessary in order to revolutionize the industry and bring new, exciting solutions to the market.