Virtual Iron’s latest release optimizes power usage

Virtual Iron Software announced today that it is going to make a new version of its server virtualization platform available later this month. Version 4.4 extends Virtual Iron’s virtual infrastructure management capabilities with the addition of LivePower.

LivePower is a new experimental feature that automatically optimizes power usage to deliver significant cost savings and environmental benefits across the datacenter. The feature sounds very similar to VMware’s experimental Distributed Power Management (DPM) introduced with VMware VirtualCenter 2.5.

Like VMware’s solution, LivePower will help optimize the datacenter’s power consumption by monitoring the resource utilization taking place in the virtual infrastructure. Virtual Iron stated that when there is excess CPU capacity, LivePower consolidates virtual machines onto fewer physical servers and shuts down the remaining devices based on predefined policies. When the virtual machine load increases beyond predefined thresholds, LivePower turns physical servers back on and migrates virtual machines to rebalance the virtual datacenter to ensure that resource requirements and service levels are met.

Chris Barclay, director of product management at Virtual Iron told me, “LivePower is a logical extension of Virtual Iron’s virtual infrastructure management platform. It leverages the same policy-based automation capabilities to optimize power consumption. It can provide an additional 25 percent in power savings beyond those achieved with server consolidation. And that’s a conservative estimate.”

Features like LivePower are going to be extremely important to power management at the enterprise level. But power and cooling reductions are becoming every bit as important to small- and medium-size businesses. In some cases, SMBs simply have little to no choice in the matter. If they can’t reduce power consumption, they can’t accommodate additional IT infrastructure or deliver on new service level requirements.

“This is one more example of Virtual Iron providing small and medium-size enterprises with all the capabilities of a true server virtualization solution,” said Tony Asaro, Virtual Iron’s chief strategy officer. “SMEs are not settling for less. They want all the capabilities they can get in VMware, without the cost and complexity. And Virtual Iron is delivering exactly that.”

The company said this enables Virtual Iron to continue to clearly differentiate itself from VMware at the high end and new entrants like Microsoft Hyper-V at the low end.

With this announcement, Virtual Iron also became the first server virtualization software provider to announce support for Intel Dynamic Power Node Manager, which will be available with Intel Next Generation Platform (Nehalem-EP).

According to Intel, Node Manager has the following features:

• Dynamic Power Monitoring: Measures actual power consumption of a server platform within acceptable error margin of +/- 10 percent. Node Manager gathers information from PSMI instrumented power supply, provides real-time power consumption data (point in time, or average over an interval), and reports through IPMI interface.
• Platform Power Capping: Sets platform power to a targeted power budget while maintaining maximum performance for the given power level. Node Manager receives power policy from an external management console through IPMI interface and maintains power at targeted level by dynamically adjusting CPU p-states.
• Power Threshold Alerting: Node Manager monitors platform power against targeted power budget. When the target power budget cannot be maintained, Node Manager sends out alerts to the management console.

Node Manager, in combination with Virtual Iron’s LivePower, enables users to automatically maintain power budgets, turn servers off and on, and optimize power consumption.