Virtual Machine Host Support

Although initially designed for Bare Metal installation and operation, our products also run well on Virtual Machine (VM) hosts. About half of our customers have their vtAlpha and vtVAX systems running in a VM infrastructure.

Support for the most popular VM products is available right out of the box.

It works just like the Bare Metal product, only now there is a Virtual Machine Layer added underneath.

We even have a special installation kit that can be imported as an appliance into the VM you are using. No installation is required, simply insert vtAlpha/vtVAX into your VM environment.

As it is designed to run Bare Metal, vtServer includes many of the same functions your company VM product. Both have Hypervisor capabilities, meaning both can converge virtual data pipelines (network, storage) across a single physical pipeline. Equally both are able to carve up the host in multiple VMs.

It is therefore good practice to decide beforehand which layer is best suited to which function. In terms of network links, for example, when multiple vtAlpha and vtVAX instances run in one vtServer environment, they may have an internal network link that does not go outside the box. As vtServer is aware of all instances that are running it can arrange communication between them. If vtAlpha/vtVAX run inside their own VM container, they will not be aware of each other and therefore not able to share the available resources in vtServer.

Special VM capabilities like Live Host Migration that are provided by certain VM vendors are well supported and have been proven to work in real life. A Live Host Migration demonstration video is available. Live Host Migration might steer you towards single instance VMs, allowing the virtual Alpha(s) and VAX(es) to migrate from one host to another, if desired.