Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization software solutions, today announced its plans to join Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program when available in June 2008. With this program, Virtual Iron will test and validate the Virtual Iron platform running Windows Server 2008 and prior versions of Microsoft’s server operating system. Once the platform is validated, Microsoft will offer support to Virtual Iron customers running Microsoft Windows Server as guest operating systems in Virtual Iron virtual environments. As a result, mutual customers will have greater access to Microsoft’s comprehensive support capabilities, improved support hand-offs between the two companies, increasing satisfaction and adoption.

“Microsoft has worked with industry partners, such as Virtual Iron, to create a technical support model that will meet customers’ growing demands,” said Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization at Microsoft Corp. “As more customers deploy and virtualize Windows-based applications on Windows Server 2008, Virtual Iron or other server virtualization software, this program ensures that customers receive a joint support experience for their virtual infrastructure deployments.”

Currently, the vast majority of Virtual Iron customers are virtualizing Windows Server workloads in their data centers. The Virtual Iron platform supports most Windows operating systems, including Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP and Windows Vista. Virtual Iron recently announced its participation in the Interoperability Vendor Alliance. It is also a licensee of Microsoft’s Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) Image Format, which allows Virtual Iron users to easily patch, recover and manage their virtual servers across physical machines.

Virtual Iron provides easy-to-use, enterprise-class capabilities on a next-generation architecture, significantly reducing the obstacles to mainstream market adoption. The platform combines the latest version of the Xen® open source hypervisor with advanced virtualization services and policy-based automation capabilities such as LiveMigrate™, LiveRecovery™ and LiveCapacity™. It also takes full advantage of the latest hardware–assisted virtualization capabilities from AMD and Intel to deliver near native performance. Users leverage Virtual Iron to support a broad range of data center initiatives.

"Technical support is a top priority for our customers when considering virtualization adoption," said Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron. “Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program allows our mutual customers to take full advantage of all our advanced capabilities while streamlining their access to comprehensive technical support from Microsoft and Virtual Iron.”