Red Hat rivals VMware with stand-alone hypervisor release

Open source giant releases KVM server virtualisation technology

By John Fontana | Network World US
Published: 14:33 GMT, 04 November 09

Red Hat made good on its promise to deliver a stand-alone hypervisor and a set of management tools as its gears up to go toe-to-toe with VMware and Microsoft to become a top-tier provider of virtualisation and cloud computing infrastructure.

Red Hat made generally available its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, which includes both a stand-alone hypervisor and a management platform. Both were first introduced at the Red Hat Summit in August.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor supports both Linux and Windows virtual servers and desktops. The hypervisor is based on Red Hat Enterprise 5.4 kernel with KVM, which was released earlier this year.

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"It inherits all the enterprise features of RHEL 5," says Navin Thadani, senior director of the virtualization business at Red Hat. He also said performance is on par with bare metal deployments.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor can scale up to 96 cores with 1TB of RAM at the host level, and up 16 virtual CPUs and 64GB of RAM at the guest level. In addition, it supports live migration, power management features, multi-part I/O and memory page sharing.

The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers is the second component of the suite. It is a centralized server virtualization management system that features high-availability tools, live migration, load balancing, and image management for Linux and Windows machines. It also has set of centralized monitoring tools.

Red Hat also says that it is in beta with the desktop version of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager, which will offer a full VDI environment and support for SPICE remote rendering technology.

Those tools are the product of last year's $107 million acquisition of Qumranet. Red Hat said in September that the APIs from those tools will be merged into Libvirt, the current virtualization API used by Red Hat, around the time RHEL 6 is releasedRed Hat officials said the tools will be on par with VMware's base management platform, and that partners will be called on to add capabilities to the base platform.

In addition, the tools also will be positioned for managing public clouds, creating a link between internal networks and hosted platforms.

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