With a growing list of who's who in the virtualization platform market, virtualization vendors like Virtual Iron have been trying to carve out their own niche market to help them expand their sales efforts. Moving beyond the server consolidation use case, Virtual Iron is introducing the latest version of its product, 4.2, to help production environments with business continuity by focusing on increased support f With a growing list of who’s who in the virtualization platform market, virtualization vendors like Virtual Iron have been trying to carve out their own niche market to help them expand their sales efforts.Moving beyond the server consolidation use case, Virtual Iron is introducing the latest version of its product, 4.2, to help production environments with business continuity by focusing on increased support for disaster recovery, high availability and dynamic capacity management.The new version of the company’s virtualization suite includes a new management tool called LiveSnapshot which provides virtual server snapshots for hot backups and patch management. These capabilities enable offloaded, space efficient and no-downtime backups on live virtual machines running in production environments and it also reduces the time needed for virtual machine patching in development and test processes. Virtual Iron 4.2 also adds multi-pathing for virtual server Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks to better support business continuity and redundancy and help speed up the I/O process. The company has also added the ability to dynamically increase the size of both disk groups and virtual disks to provide increased storage on demand. And they’ve broadened support to include new operating system support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.“Well over half of our customers today are leveraging Virtual Iron’s comprehensive virtualization platform to support more advanced use cases such as disaster recovery and high availability,” said Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron Software. “Version 4.2 adds to these already robust capabilities to extend support for our many end users running demanding workloads in production environments while making Virtual Iron even easier to install, deploy and manage.”The company is still offering the same pricing structure with the latest version. They offer a free version of the software that supports up to 12 virtual machines per physical server, an Enterprise Edition for $499 per socket, and an Extended Enterprise Edition with all of the tools for $799 per socket. Software Development