The Virtual Iron solution consists of three components:

1. Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager provides a central place to control and automate virtual resources. It streamlines tasks that are normally highly manual and time-intensive and significantly reduces data center costs and complexity.
2. Virtual Iron Virtualization Services are deployed automatically on bare-metal, industry-standard servers without requiring software installation or management. These features streamline data center management and reduce operational costs.
3. Open Source Virtualization, based on an open source hypervisor derived from the open source community project, is the first software loaded when the physical server boots. The hypervisor manages all hardware resources and leverages the hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities built into Intel and AMD processors to create an abstraction layer between physical hardware and virtual resources

Virtualization Platform

Feature	Benefit
LiveProvisioning	A "zero touch" automated deployment capability that eliminates the need for physical installation or management of virtualization software on physical servers.
Virtual Storage Management	Create virtual storage on the fly from local, fibre channel or iSCSI storage servers.
Virtual Network Management	Create virtual switches that allow virtual machines to use standard networks or vLANs transparently.
Virtual Machine Creation Wizard	Use the virtual machine create wizard to simply create virtual infrastructure by cloning existing templates or creating new servers: Up to 8 CPUs Up to 32 GB RAM Up to 5 NICs with unique MAC addresses Scheduling priority Resource throttling
LiveMigration	Migrate workloads from one physical server to another, for example to provide additional capacity, without any application downtime.
LiveCapacity	LiveCapacity optimizes virtual machine performance and data center utilization. It accomplishes this by rebalancing nodes by moving virtual machines when the node's CPU utilization is above a threshold.
LiveRecovery	LiveRecovery automates virtual machine recovery from physical hardware failures without the cost and complexity of clustering software. Virtual machines can be automatically restarted on new hardware when physical hardware fails, reducing outage duration and operational costs.
LiveMaintenance	LiveMaintenance automates the process of taking a physical server out of service for maintenance, such as adding more physical memory, without impacting the virtual machines running on it. LiveMaintenance uses LiveMigrate to move virtual machines - without stopping operating systems or applications - to other nodes in the virtual data center.
LiveSnapshot	LiveSnapshot creates space-efficient point in time images of running or stopped virtual machines. LiveSnapshot makes it easy to try patches and roll back to previous states, or backup a running virtual machine.
LiveConvert	An automated software solution powered by PlateSpin that enables customers to easily migrate workloads (data, applications and operating systems) from physical, virtual and image-based infrastructures. LiveConvert provides Virtual Iron users with the ability to quickly migrate workloads between physical servers and virtual machines allowing users to quickly achieve the benefits of large-scale server consolidation.
Jobs and Reports	View historical information on system performance or administrative actions in the data center. Useful for capacity planning, billing and 404 auditing.
User-based Access Control	Perform user management locally or connect with Microsoft Active Directory or LDAP servers. Prevent unauthorized users from using the system. Monitor changes based on user actions for compliance purposes.