Red Hat breaks down barriers to widespread virtualization adoption

The virtualization industry today
Virtualization is transforming the way organizations deploy and manage their IT resources. By helping them more efficiently utilize hardware, software, and personnel, virtualization enables them to build infrastructures that are flexible, scalable, and – most importantly – economical as they strive to become truly agile businesses.

But although virtualization is now considered a mainstream technology, virtual machines still only account for less than 20 percent of all data center servers. Today’s x86 virtualization solutions are typically deployed only in non-mission-critical workloads or development and test environments. The reason? Despite the fact that proprietary virtualization solutions come with robust management tools that ease their deployment and administration, their use is constrained by poor performance, limited scalability, compromised stability and security, and high cost.

Red Hat’s unique position
Red Hat is in an unparalleled position to deliver comprehensive virtualization for customers.  Leveraging a strong ecosystem of hardware and software partners, the Company is focused on breaking down barriers to reliable, large-scale virtualization deployment. Red Hat first entered the virtualization industry with the delivery of open source virtualization technologies integrated into the operating system with the debut of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 in March 2007. Since, the virtualization technology built into Red Hat Enterprise Linux has established Red Hat as the leading provider of commercial-quality open source virtualization. Tested and certified by the leading hardware vendors, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its integrated virtualization technology has been hardened by many years of production deployments in some of the world’s most demanding enterprises. 

With years of experience delivering the industry's most stable and secure computing platform through Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat is today uniquely positioned to push virtualization to the next level. The Company has outlined plans to deliver a new platform that provides a high-performing, scalable, and secure virtualization environment for enterprise-class applications. Building upon the virtualization technology currently integrated inside Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat will deliver the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform in 2009, providing virtualization powered by kernel based virtual machine (KVM) virtualization – the Linux kernel’s native virtualization technology, which transforms the Linux kernel into a fully featured, high-performance, secure hypervisor.

The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of products
Organizations seeking to virtualize their IT environments have a broad array of options to choose from. With the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization product portfolio, Red Hat establishes itself as the industry leader for providing a stable, secure, scalable, high-performing, and manageable virtualization environment at a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has included Xen hypervisor technology since its original release in March 2007. Xen provides a proven, stable, and mature virtualization environment, with many successful deployments in place today. Red Hat is committed to support Xen for the full lifecycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, which extends until at least 2014. Meanwhile, beginning with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, Red Hat will add the KVM hypervisor, allowing customers to run either Xen or KVM virtualization. Existing customers are expected to continue to use Xen virtualization, and transition to KVM at a suitable time, while new customers will use KVM from the outset.

KVM will allow Red Hat Enterprise Linux to simultaneously act as a hypervisor as well as an operating system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux with KVM will dramatically improve the efficiency of the data center without compromising performance of either physical or virtual machines. It will also enable smooth transition of mission-critical data center applications to a virtualized environment. 

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers.  As the industry’s most scalable virtualization management system, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers is planned be the first product to allow fully integrated management across virtual servers and desktops. Its simple, scalable Web-based user and scripting interfaces and search-driven management capabilities will make managing thousands of virtual machines easy. It will support advanced virtualization management capabilities, including image management, live migration, high availability, system scheduler, power saver, maintenance manager, and infrastructure monitoring and reporting.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops. This fully integrated management system will provide remote rendering technology and a hypervisor stack for virtual desktops. It will include a connection broker, provisioning management, image management, and high availability, among other management capabilities, and SPICE remote rendering technology for making the user experience on a virtual machine indistinguishable from that of a physical PC. Because of the high density of virtual desktops, optimized rendering technology performance, and savings on storage, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager will offer an industry-leading cost-performance ratio for the virtual desktop interface (VDI).

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor. Planned for release in 2009 and offering high performance, excellent scalability, and secure hypervisor, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor will support both Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as guest operating systems. Based on the trusted Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel with KVM technology, this product will feature market-leading host scalability of 96 cores and 1TB of memory, with guests scaling up to 16 virtual CPUs and 64GB of memory. Advanced features will include live migration, memory page sharing, thin storage provisioning, and SELinux security, and it will be simple and easy to deploy, in either stateless or stateful modes.

The new virtualization products in Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualization portfolio will be made available sequentially over the next three to 18 months.

For more information
* Read more about Red Hat’s virtualization solutions available today: www.redhat.com/rhel/virtualization
* Read more about Red Hat’s plans for the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio: www.redhat.com/virtualization-strategy
* Contact us to receive more information: www.redhat.com/virtualization-strategy-info