Virtual Iron announced the release yesterday of version 4.4 of its eponymous software package with a new feature called LivePower which aims to reduce power consumption in large virtual server farms with variable demand.

You may not have heard of Virtual Iron before in the virtualization market, crowded as it is with players like VMWare, Microsoft, and Citrix. VI entered the market in late 2006 and according to Tim Walsh, director of corporate marketing, the company has intentionally focused on the Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) market, aiming to provide a "comparable alternative to VMWare." With, according to VI, 80% of VMWare's features at 30% of the price, the company has eked out over 2000 deployments in that segment. It's difficult to make a feature to feature comparison, considering all the various options and modules VMWare can provide, but that in itself lends some advantage to Virtual Iron in the SME environment: one-stop shopping means less research and fewer unpleasant surprises.

Similar to VMWare's Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and VMotion features in VMWare Infrastructure, Virtual Iron's LivePower module monitors CPU utilization by Virtual Machine (VM) instances and has the ability to dynamically allocate VMs across physical hardware to reduce power utilization when demand is low, by consolidating VMs on servers, or to ramp up additional servers and spread VMs across them as demand increases. The rules-based policy fits in with VI's existing policy schemes and works with Intel's out-of-band Node Manager power management policy engine.

Although LivePower may prove useful to SMEs looking to manage their power consumption (and is anyone not, with spiking energy prices?) I'm not sure the technology is quite the load-balancing boon that it could be if it measured performance based on more than simply CPU utilization. Particularly in the SME, which is less likely to have consolidated, SAN-based storage systems, server disk I/O is more commonly a performance obstacle than processor clock cycles (depending on the applications, of course).

Nonetheless, Virtual Iron are comfortable in their niche and seem confident they are delivering the feature set their target audience is looking for. Asked if VMWare's recent move to offer ESXi for free or Microsoft's Hyper-V release were threats of any sort, Walsh emphatically denied it. Mentioning Microsoft's upcoming $300 million Hyper-V marketing campaign, Walsh indicated that Virtual Iron was "looking forward to it," although Microsoft might ultimately be the most likely competitor for VI among SMEs if they ever manage to put together a rival management platform. Until then, VI is well positioned to hold the middle ground in the virtualization wars.