What is "Virtage"?*

Issue

What is "Virtage"?*

Environment

Virtage hardware partitioning feature enabled on Hitachi BladeSymphony(Hitachi Compute Blade) Servers.

Resolution

Virtage is Hitachi's hardware partitioning system provided via firmware that is offered as a feature on the Hitachi server products such as the BladeSymphony 2000, the BladeSymphony 500 and BladeSymphony 320. Each Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) image runs in a portion of the server as partitioned by the Virtage firmware and each RHEL image only sees part of the actual hardware.
Other instances of RHEL or other operating systems may be present in other partitions set up by Virtage.

Virtage is enabled on Hitachi servers via their Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) prior to booting the operating systems. It is supported by Hitachi like their system BIOS, BMC, service processor and other hardware functions.

Virtage is certified as a feature of a specific hardware system (like the BladeSymphony 2000, the BladeSymphony 500 and the BladeSymphony 320) and is therefore listed as a feature on that system. It is not a separate software offering that a customer can purchase and install on other hardware (Hitachi or otherwise).

For additional information see the Hitachi website http://www.hitachi.com and specifically

* For the BladeSymphony: http://www.hitachi.co.jp/products/bladesymphony/product/bladeserver.html (Japanese)

* For the Hitachi Compute Blade: http://www.hds.com/products/compute-blade/ (English)

* "Virtage" is a trademark for Hitachi's hardware partitioning system. This trademark is only used in the United States and Japan.