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Just a couple of weeks ago Red Hat made bold move by releasing its remote desktop protocol SPICE, acquired from Qumranet in September 2008, as open source.

The company now offers the SPICE drivers for KVM virtual machines.

The package (for Windows XP only at the moment) creates a virtual GPU called Red HAt QXL and a Virtual Desktop Interface Port.

Administrators are also required to install a SPICE agent inside each Windows guest.
At that point the SPICE client, which is part of the open source release, will be able to connect to the virtual machine.

Thanks to Linux-KVM for the news.

Labels: KVM, Qumranet, Red Hat, Releases

Red Hat embraced hardware virtualization a long time ago by adopting Xen as part of its Enterprise Linux operating system.
Despite that the company never penetrated the market enough to become a serious competitor for VMware, Microsoft and Citrix.
In the attempt to increase its chances to become a key player in the virtualization space, Red Hat is making some courageous choices.

First, it replaced Xen with KVM, becoming the first major vendor to sell and support this relatively new platform inside enterprise (IBM supports KVM too, but just for VDI and just for a very specific software stack).

Now, right before launching its VDI offering, Red Hat has open sourced the SPICE remote desktop protocol, acquired from Qumranet in September 2008. And this is a major step, one of the few that could make a difference.

All the other major virtualization players released or are about to release high performance remote desktop protocols that are optimized for VDI: Citrix has the ICA/HDX, VMware and Teradici just released the software-only version of PCoIP, and Microsoft is expected to integrate the technologies acquired from Calista in its RDP.
On top of these three, there’s a crowd that is pushing for its own proprietary protocol (like VDIworks and Pano Logic) or for its own RDP optimizations (like Quest and Ericom).

In this mess of non-compatible, brand new protocols, an open source alternative is certainly interesting.

The availability of SPICE as open source has many potential ramifications.
First of all, it may immediately attract IBM, which is using the Citrix HDX protocol today for its brand new desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offering. 
Secondarily, it may be integrated in Xen, which would increase the chances to have major contributors like Oracle.
More than that, it may slip in most thin clients, because vendors are free to extend it and integrate in their devices without having to deal with anybody.
Last but not least, it may receive the support of many cloud providers that, over time, will have to deal with heterogeneous virtualization platforms in their IaaS clouds.

The most important thing, anyway, is that the open sourced SPICE protocol could become part of the Linux kernel. Qumranet already succeeded in a similar challenge with KVM, after just six months of development.
If the Linux kernel will integrate SPICE, every distribution will feature it out-of-the-box in a few months. And this means that every Linux guest OS will be VDI-ready without doing anything.

Of course the success of SPICE will depend much on its performance. Brian Madden published a valuable insight on this very point covering the architecture and features of the protocol.

The open source version of SPICE is available here.

Labels: KVM, Qumranet, Red Hat, VDI

The formal launch of the new Red Hat virtualization offering based on KVM is just a few days away.

Excluding the products names, so far most Red Hat didn’t disclose any detail about the platform that will replace its previous implementation of Xen.

For the impatient ones, Mark Wilson published some concrete information about this product that are worth a check (our emphasis):

…It’s a standalone hypervisor, based on a RHEL kernel with KVM, and is expected to be less than 100MB in size.

Bootable from PXE, flash, local disk or SAN it will support up to 96 processing cores and 1TB of RAM, with VMs up to 16 vCPUs and 256GB of RAM.

Red Hat is claiming that its high-performance virtual input/output drivers and PCI-pass through direct I/O will allow RHEV to offer 98% of the performance of a physical (bare metal) solution.

In addition, RHEV includes the dynamic memory page sharing technology that only Microsoft is unable to offer on it’s hypervisor right now; SELinux for isolation; live migration; snapshots; and thin provisioning.

…

supporting guests from RHEL3 to 5, and from Windows 2000 to Vista and Server 2008 (presumably soon to include Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2).

RHEV is an x64 only solution and makes extensive use of hardware assisted virtualisation, with directed I/O (Intel VT-d/AMD IOMMU) used for secure PCI passthrough together with PCI single root I/O virtualisation.

…

The real story is with management and Red Hat is also introducing an RHEV Manager product.

I was impressed with (that I don’t remember seeing in System Center Virtual Machine Manager, although I may be mistaken) is a search-driven user interface. Whilst many virtual machine management products have the ability to tag virtual machines for grouping, etc., RHEV Manager can return results based on queries such as, show me all the virtualisation hosts running above 85% utilisation.

…

The third part of Red Hat’s virtualisation portfolio is RHEV Manager for desktops - a virtual desktop infrastructure offering using the simple protocol for independent computing environments (SPICE) adaptive remote rendering technology to connect to Red Hat’s own connection broker service from within a web browser client using ActiveX or .XPI extensions.

Red hat claim that their VDI experience is indistinguishable from a physical desktop including 32-bit colour, high quality streaming video, multi-monitor support (up to 4 monitors), bi-directional audio and video (for VoIP and video conferencing), USB device redirection and WAN optimisation compression…

Thanks to DABCC for the news.

Labels: KVM, Qumranet, Red Hat

By now most virtualization.info readers should know that Red Hat plans to (finally) unveil its KVM-based virtualization offering on Sep. 1, at the Red Hat Summit 2009 in Chicago (and maybe at VMware VMworld 2009 as well).

The new product portfolio will include not one but two management solutions:

• Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers featuring Live Migration, High Availability, System Scheduler, Power Manager, Image manager, Snapshots, thin provisioning, monitoring and reporting.
• Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops (the connection broker and management console SolidICE acquired from Qumranet in September 2008)

While the public knows how SolidICE looks like, nobody really saw the first management solution above, except the few lucky beta testers that Red Hat secretly selected before June.

The only public management solution for virtual infrastructures that Red Hat is working on is called virt-Manager.
The product is promising (supports Xen, KVM and QEMU virtual machines) but it’s in the work since September 2006, it still is at version 0.80 (released at the end of July) and doesn’t seem enterprise-ready at all:

Redhat’s virtual machine manager has come a long way and is starting to show some real usability. I’ve gone from using command line exclusively to now only using command line for testing purposes. There’s still a lot to do but it’s still only version 0.8 and it’s developing at a nice pace. Apart from the bug with creating vms using existing storage, I’ve had no real usability problems with it. I am, however, looking forward to a nicer main viewer.

Hopefully virt-manager is not the product that Red Hat plans to use to compete against VMware vCenter, Citrix XenCenter and Essential, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Oracle/Virtual Iron management platforms.

Labels: KVM, Qumranet, Red Hat

With the acquisition of Qumranet in September 2008 Red Hat raised a lot of interest.
The customers that trusted the company when it was promoting its Xen implementation all over the place want to know what will happen to them.
The potential customers that are interested in an open source hypervisor but  dislike the idea of Citrix indirectly controlling how Xen, want to know how serious Red Hat is about KVM.

Last week, finally, the company announced its commitment:

• Next versions of Enterprise Linux (RHEL) will feature KVM.
  The exiting versions featuring Xen will be supported for the full lifetime of RHEL 5.
• Red Hat will release a brand new Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (a minimal version of RHEL only supporting KVM and a selected number of drivers).
• Red Hat will release a brand new Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers featuring Live Migration, High Availability, System Scheduler, Power Manager, Image manager, Snapshots, thin provisioning, monitoring and reporting.
  This product will be able to manage both RHEL and RHEVH.
• Red hat will rebrand the Qumranet connection broker and management console SolidICE as Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops.

All the products above will be delivered sequentially over the next three to 18 months, with delivery dates beginning in the middle of 2009.

Of course the biggest concern about KVM is that ISVs are not supporting it. And because something like 95% of the existing virtual machines run Windows guest operating systems, a partnership with Microsoft is fundamental.

This is why just two weeks ago Red Hat joined the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).
Without it, the company could sell its new virtualization platform only to those customers that run Linux guest OSes, and that is a small niche compared to the huge virtualization market.

Yet, much depends on how the new platform will be priced (something that the company didn’t announce yet).
The free XenServer can damage Red hat much more than VMware.

Labels: KVM, Qumranet, Red Hat

Since months now a serious number of companies and open source contributors is looking at Red Hat to understand its new virtualization strategy.

The company took a major step in June when it thrown out of window years of efforts on Xen to fully replace it with KVM.
Just two months after, Red Hat acquired Qumranet, the company that started KVM, that maintains it, that managed to inject it into the Linux kernel, and that sells a very interesting VDI solution.

What Red Hat wants to do now with KVM and Qumranet (somebody hopes that their highly performing VDI protocol SPICE will be open sourced) is critical to understand what chances has Linux to impose itself as a valuable virtualization platforms against the popular hypervisors ESX (offered by VMware) and Xen (offered by every other vendor except Microsoft).

Some hints of the new strategy surface in a recent interview that InformationWeek arranged with Jim Whitehurst, the Red Hat CEO:

Q: What is Red Hat's strategy with virtualization?

A: …We'll be offering both server and desktop virtualization. The first use-case of server consolidation is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a long-term use for grids of servers running large numbers of desktops. We plan to be the leading virtualization vendor based on the server operating system…

Q: What about cloud computing?

A: Clouds will run Linux.

It’s clear that Red Hat sees in KVM a huge opportunity to differentiate from Citrix, Virtual Iron, Oracle and its worst competitor Novell.
Now the company has to to execute in a much better way that how it did with Xen.

Labels: KVM, Qumranet, Red Hat

It may be just a coincidence but the just released Fedora 10 doesn’t include Xen. And this happens just a month after Red Hat unveiled its new virtualization strategy, adopting KVM and acquiring the startup that maintains it: Qumranet.

The reason behind this unexpected drop is explained in the official project newsletter:

No Dom0 Support in Fedora 10

…”There is pretty much zero chance that Fedora 10 will include a Xen Dom0 host. While upstream Xen developers are making good progress on porting Dom0 to paravirt_ops, there is simply too little time for this to be ready for Fedora 10. So if you need to use Fedora 10 as a host, then KVM is your only viable option at this time. If you can wait for Fedora 11 (or use RHEL-5 / CentOS-5) then Xen may be an option for you." …

The distribution lifecycle implies a new major release every six months on average.
This means that Fedora users will have a long time to explore the opportunities that KVM offers. And in the meanwhile Red Hat will be able to further attract them with some new interesting products based on Qumranet technology.

Thanks to Mike DiPetrillo for the news.

Labels: KVM, Qumranet, Red Hat, Xen