Red Hat testing virtualization lineup

Red Hat has begun beta-testing its new line of virtualization products based on Qumranet's KVM hypervisor.

The tests are the next stage in development of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) lineup, which was announced by the company in February. The RHEV portfolio includes a standalone hypervisor, RHEV-H, as well as virtualization managers for servers and desktops. In its announcement earlier this year, Red Hat said the products would be made available within the following 18 months, which sets a deadline of August 2010.

"We are in a unique position to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of virtualization solutions, ranging from a standalone hypervisor to a virtualized operating system to a comprehensive virtualization management product suite," Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat's platform business unit, said Tuesday in the beta-test announcement.

Red Hat's RHEV strategy puts the company into direct competition with Citrix. That company owns XenSource, which created and maintains Xen. Red Hat is also competing with companies such as Microsoft and VMware on virtualization.

KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a native or "bare metal" hypervisor that runs directly on x86-based host hardware, rather than running on top of an operating system. Red Hat is building the hypervisor into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), starting with version 5.4. In addition, KVM will replace the previous virtualization system, which was based on Xen, in Red Hat's products. However, the company will continue to support Xen-based deployments for the full lifetime of RHEL 5.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers will allow management across virtual servers and virtual desktops. Its features include live migration, high availability, a system scheduler, a power manager, an image manager, snapshots, thin provisioning, monitoring and reporting. The management tool will be able to manage RHEL 5 hosts as well as RHEV-H, Red Hat said.

The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops is based on Qumranet's Solid ICE desktop virtualization product and uses Qumranet's Spice remote rendering protocol. Red Hat bought Qumranet, the creator of KVM, for $107 million in September.

Matthew Broersma of ZDNet UK reported from London.

[nazzdeq]

Redhat has made a major error in going with KVM. Virtualization should stay virtualization and out of the kernel. KVM is just zones/containers and allows you only to run more Redhat domains. Whoopity doo. Xen lets you run VMs of any OS you want on the same server. I prefer the Xen approach much better and Xen is supported by Citrix, Oracle/Sun, Novell and many others. Citrix XenServer is now free too. Insert nail in Redhat's KVM coffin. Redhat doesn't need their "own" solution anyway they could have just kept on supporting Xen. I will abandon Redhat before I abandon Xen and I think many others will too.

[jlaustill]

I would disagree with you, I think RedHats KVM approach will prove to be the ultimate solution to Virtualization in the near future. The underlying technology is far superior and will result in hardware and software having a true virtual middle layer wherein you can treat both hardware and software as a service instead of a solution. This is my guess however, and I've been wrong before :).