Correction at 7:15 a.m. PST November 4: At one time, Red Hat had planned to ship an embedded KVM hypervisor based on Fedora. But the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor uses the RHEL 5.4 kernel and thereby picks up the same hardware verification portfolio.
With Tuesday's release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager (RHEV-M) for servers, the company has completed the first phase of a server virtualization rollout that effectively now puts KVM front and center. Red Hat released KVM commercially for the first time in September as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.
KVM is a server virtualization technology that Red Hat acquired when it bought Qumranet in 2008. Red Hat favors KVM over the other primary open-source hypervisor, Xen, for both business and technical reasons. (Although, as of version 5.4, Xen remains the default hypervisor for RHEL.)
The business reason is that, while Red Hat has made contributions to Xen, competitors are far more associated with the project. Novell, the owners of the only other major enterprise Linux distribution, ran especially hard with Xen early on. And Citrix, not a direct competitor but certainly a major virtualization player, bought XenSource, the commercial entity formed by Xen's creators.
From a technical perspective, Red Hat's issue is that it's hard to keep Xen and the Linux kernel in sync. Xen's a standalone hypervisor layer but it has deeply invasive hooks into the Linux kernel and, therefore, keeping the two working together takes a lot of development and testing effort. It's a bit reminiscent of how new versions of the Veritas file system had to be carefully matched to new versions of Solaris or HP-UX.
By contrast, KVM is kernel-based. This means that it is actually part and parcel of the Linux kernel rather than a quasi-independent piece of software. In part for this reason, it's KVM that is now included in the mainline Linux kernel as of version 2.6.20.
As of version 5.4, an instance of RHEL can host guest virtual machines running RHEL 5 and other operating systems including Windows Server 2008. This announcement adds Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor, something that is often referred to as an "embedded hypervisor." It uses the same RHEL 5.4 kernel as Red Hat's full enterprise distribution.
Embedded hypervisors have taken off more slowly than many of us expected. But all the major virtualization players offer one so Red Hat needed to as well.
From my perspective, the Red Hat Virtualization Manager is more significant. On the one hand, management is important to--indeed central to--virtualization. On the other hand, it's an area where Red Hat has lagged. CTO Brian Stevens admitted as much to me when we spoke at the company's financial analyst day last month when he said that RHEV-M "has been a huge missing ingredient."
Red Hat historically mostly focused on updating packages. This is a reflection of the broader Linux and open-source ecosystem in general. Projects like Nagios and, more recently, GroundWork notwithstanding, management doesn't play well to the strengths of open source because it's such a "high surface area" application. But Red Hat had to attack management from some angle unless it was prepared to just cede that area of differentiation and potential point of control to system makers and others.
RHEV-M is Red Hat's first step toward remedying this deficiency. It seems a necessary move especially given that KVM is likely to be used, at least initially, as part of a Red Hat software stack and therefore Red Hat pretty much has to support the tools to manage KVM if it's to gain any market traction.
That said, this is very much a first step. The initial product only manages KVM. Furthermore, the management server has to be running Windows Server 2003 which you would rightly think a rather odd decision from a company that is one of the pioneers of open source. (Apparently, this was a decision by Qumranet and Red Hat has not yet developed a version that can run on Linux.)
Red Hat has clearly prioritized getting a usable if limited product into customers' hands. They trotted out one such at their financial analyst day. Dave Costakos of Qualcomm was happy with what he saw. He told me that they wanted a Web-based interface, which RHEV Manager has. He also liked the integration with Active Directory and other directory systems, the role-based access controls, and the provisioning capabilities.
Overall, Red Hat's virtualization play remains less filled in than do the plays of others. But it's now started in a systematic way.
We've seen a lot of changes in system vendors' management products over the past few years. One reason is that server management isn't just about hardware and operating systems any longer. It gets more important every day to be able to handle virtualized servers too. Sure, there are separate applications that specialize in managing virtual machines--VMware's Virtual Center, for example. However, today's (and, for the most part, tomorrow's) reality is that most organizations have a mix of physical and virtual servers that they'd like to manage in a common and consistent way, to the degree that's possible.
As a result, system vendors have been retooling their products to handle both physical and virtual management. Even when they use Virtual Center or other third-party products to provide some of the low-level control functions needed to operate on hypervisors in a virtualized environment, they aim to abstract and hide the underlying technical differences from the person doing the managing.
Sun is the latest to revamp its server management tools--and it's partly the result of adding the ability to manage virtualized environments. Even the name reflects this: xVM Ops Center. (xVM is Sun's hypervisor family that's based on Xen on x86 servers and Sun's own firmware-based LDoms on SPARC.)
xVM Ops Center is the merging and retooling of two current Sun products: Sun Connection (which handles system updates) and Sun N1 System Manager (its server management, monitoring, and provisioning tool). Sun Management Center, the longstanding tool still used by many customers to manage Solaris on SPARC servers, in unaffected by this announcement. The Sun N1 Service Provisioning System (SPS)--an automation and policy tool based on Sun's CenterRun acquisition--also remains as a separate product, although Sun plans to create a plug-in for SPS that will allow it to control Ops Center.
Sun put a lot of effort into making the tool as easy to use as possible. It has a browser-based user interface that makes heavy use of modern "AJAX-y" programming techniques. For example, moving the mouse over items displays more detailed information. More substantively, Ops Center does in-depth analysis of the effect of patches at the binary level. This differs from most Linux update mechanisms, which are mostly concerned with dependencies at the level of entire applications. Ops Center works with SUSE Linux Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux in addition to Solaris on both x86 and SPARC.
Sun designed Ops Center to be deployed in what it calls a "three-tier model." It requires that an agent be installed on each managed server or virtual machine. (Ops Center also manages Sun's own operating system containers; in this case, a single copy of the agent can be installed in the global zone.) A local proxy server would then communicate with Sun for updates and distribute them on the local network. This approach reflects that Sun's design center tends toward large enterprise datacenters even though it's started to devote more attention to SMB of late.
Sun formally announced Ops Center today. It plans to start making source code available at OpenxVM.org on December 10, with a commercial release following on January 8. The "full product" in the sense of support for Sun's full swath of hardware platforms and operating systems (Linux and Solaris), third-party hypervisors, and a variety of fit and finish optimizations will be ready by about next June.
This is a significant step forward for Sun, which has lagged somewhat in the management space relative to what HP provides with Systems Insight Manager and IBM with System Director.
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