virtualization.info

Yesterday, finally, Red Hat announced the availability of its new virtualization offering, which includes a platform based on KVM and an enterprise virtualization manager.

The company already released Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4 in mid September, which features KVM in the same way (despite technical differences in the architecture) Microsoft Windows Server 2008 features Hyper-V.
The problem is that RHEL 5.4 plus KVM may be not enough to compete against lightweight, dedicated platforms like VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer. Additionally, RHEL 5.4 lacks of enterprise management tools that customers can use to control large scale virtual data centers.

This gap is filled today with the release of Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (REVH) and Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers (REVMS).

REVH is a stripped down version of RHEL 5.4, with the following characteristics (partial list):

• Support for Intel VT / EPT and AMD-V / RVI
• Support for up to 64 physical CPUs (up to 256 core)
• Support for up to 1TB physical RAM
• Support for up to 16 vCPUs
• Support for up to 64GB vRAM
• Support for memory overcommit (page sharing only, depending on Linux Kernel Same-page Merging)
• Support for physical NICs bonding and multipath I/O
• Support for NFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel
• Support for RHEL (from 3 to 5) and Windows (2003, 2008 and XP) guest operating systems. 
  For Windows guests Red Hat offers paravirtualized (network and block) drivers based on the VirtIO standard, which are certified by Microsoft thanks to the SVVP certification.

Red Hat reports that KVM can handle up to 600 virtual machines within a single host.
Its platform, based on KVM, is reportedly able to handle more than 400 virtual machines within a single host (with 32 cores and 1TB physical RAM).
The company also claims that it can reach up to 95% of real hardware performance for mission critical workloads like SAP or Oracle Database.

REVMS instead supports the following capabilities:

• Virtual machines live migration (across NFS, iSCSI and FC shared storage)
• Virtual machines high availability (if a host dies all its virtual machines are restarted on another one within the same cluster. It requires an out-of-band management interface such as IPMI, Dell
  DRAC, HP iLO, IBM RSA or BladeCenter for host power management.)
• Virtual machines dynamic resource management (storage, networks and computing capability can be aggregated in resource pools. The System Scheduler relocates the VMs across the hosts that are part of the pool following the system policies and using live migration)
• Hosts maintenance mode (when the host is put in maintenance REVMS uses live migration to move virtual machines elsewhere)
• Hosts power management (the System Scheduler can use live migration to relocate the VMs on low activity hosts and power down the unnecessary servers)
• Virtual machines thin provisioning (the REVMS component called Image Manager allows to overcommit storage
• Virtual machines snapshots (snapshots can be scheduled and used as recovery points)
• Virtual machines templates
• Role based access control and support for Microsoft Active Directory for the management console
• APIs

Funny enough, it seems that the REVMS console is only available for Windows clients (we’ll double-check with Red Hat on this and update this article accordingly).

The two products, bundled together with the name of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, are sold through a subscription model. Price starts at $499 for 1 socket with 12x5 support.
Of course REVMS can manage the KVM platform included inside RHEL 5.4, but the operating system must be purchased separately.

To justify the value of its new offering, Red Hat even prepared a feature comparison matrix which includes VMware vSphere 4 and VI 3.5, as well as Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, and a price comparison matrix that will generate endless discussions (we already know it):

The last piece of the new offering, Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops (REVMD), which is the SolidICE product acquired from Qumranet in September 2008, will be released in early 2010.

That piece represents the real opportunity for Red Hat to attract new customers and compete with more mature competitors. Convincing customers to change their hypervisor of choice for server consolidation isn’t easy at all, but there’s still a huge, untapped opportunity around client consolidation (aka VDI) and enough confusion to give KVM plus SPICE a chance to gain some market share.

Another critical point is how the ecosystem will welcome this new offering. The Red Hat offering isn’t able to cover every need a customer may have around managing a virtual data center, so partners are critical.
The first one to jump on the Red Hat bandwagon is VMLogix, which announced its commitment to support REVH in its lab management solution Lab Manager.
Many others have to follow to make this offering a valuable alternative to VMware, Citrix and Microsoft virtualization platforms.

Labels: Red Hat, Releases

Last week Microsoft and Red Hat announced the certification of their operating systems, Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), on each other virtualization platforms, Hyper-V and KVM.

It is a major announcement in many ways.

First of all, customers that have Windows/Linux mixed environments finally have a decent choice. 
Side by side with Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux, now Hyper-V (both R1 and R2) supports RHEL 5.2, 5.3 and the new 5.4.

More importantly, Microsoft and Red Hat validated the use of Windows Server 2003, 2008 and 2008 R2 as guest operating system on the KVM implementation that comes with RHEL 5.4.

On top of that Microsoft has even accepted to provide support to Red Hat users that run most of its enterprise applications inside KVM virtual machines.

Now, and only now, Red Hat has something concrete to tell to the customers.
With the large majority of virtual machines running Windows worldwide, without this mandatory step the new Red Hat offering couldn’t be considered anything more than an interesting future platform.

Thanks to the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) instead, KVM, or at least the Red Hat implementation of KVM, is at the same level of VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, Novell Xen and Oracle VM Server in terms of support for Microsoft technologies.

Now Red Hat has to hurry up and show the serious stuff.

Labels: Alliances, KVM, Microsoft, Red Hat

In early September while most of the virtualization community was busy in San Francisco for the VMworld 2009, Red Hat was finally releasing the first piece of its new virtualization offering in Chicago at its Summit 2009.

The market expected the company to launch the new Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (RHEVH, a minimal version of RHEL plus KVM that could compete against VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V Server), and the new Enterprise Virtualization Managers (EVMs) for servers and desktops. But Red Hat only released RHEL 4.5.

In March the company announced that these new products would be released sequentially, starting mid 2009 and for next 18 months, but for now the general public knows nothing but a few technical details unofficially published by some a beta tester.

The ones that attended the Red Hat Summit in Chicago (or visited the Red Hat booth at VMworld) knows more. Luckily, Red Hat published some breakout sessions’ videos of the event, so we all can watch the ones related to virtualization:

Linux-KVM.com published an extensive synopsis of the first one above.
Here’s some points that are worth a highlight:

• Red Hat will support ISV software certified on RHEL whether it’s running on bare metal or running on the RHEL kvm or standalone kvm since it’s the same codebase.
• RHEV standalone kvm has a very small footprint of < 100mb in size which makes it easy to do things like pxe boot it.
• Hosts can scale host to 96 cores and 1TB RAM.
• Guests can scale up to 16vcpus and 256GB RAM.
• Supported Linux guests includes RHEL 3,4,5. Supported Windows drivers available for Windows XP, 2003 and 2008.
• NUMA, power management, memory page sharing (ksm) are some other important features. KSM important for density, very important and will be in product from day 1.
  Light workload VMs on a 48 core machine: 256 GB RAM could run more than 600 VMs.
• Testing results from internal and customers showed SAP workloads: 85-95% performance, Oracle OLTP: 80-92% bare metal. LAMP stack showed better than bare metal performance. Java achieved up to 94% bare metal.
• The management tools will be released in later half of 2009.
  Supports high availability by allowing VMs to automatically restart on other host when host having problems. Supports system scheduler at cluster level, live migration and power saver mode. There’s a maintenance manager that will automatically live migrate vms off servers during scheduled maintenance. Also includes monitoring and reporting tools.
  Support image management including templates and thin provisioning
  
  Note from virtualization.info: Red Hat published a video of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager on YouTube that we are featuring in the website sidebar and on virtualization.tv.

Labels: KVM, Red Hat, Releases

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

For a long time a number of contributors sponsored by Red Hat worked on a virtualization interface that could standardize the way hypervisors are managed, getting rid of the differences between vendors’ implementations.

The API is called libvirt and it’s around since early 2006.

Red Hat has a strong commitment on it, at the point that its imminent KVM-based virtualization offering is based on its, as announced in June 2008.
This is why the API is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) which allows the inclusion in any commercial product.

Through libvirt, a management platform running on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS or even Windows can already control both Xen, KVM, Sun VirtualBox, Parallels OpenVZ, QEMU, LXC and User Mode Linux (UML). But the best has yet to come.

The just released version 0.7.0 includes a number of remarkable new features, including support for the IBM POWER hypervisor and what seems a first attempt to support VMware ESX.

Of course this doesn’t mean that VMware will allow a product using libvirt to manage its flagship hypervisor without buying vCenter Server.
But for sure it means that in a near future Red Hat may be able to offer what Microsoft already offer with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM): the capability to control multiple hypervisors through a single management console. And this may be extremely appealing for some of those customers that already purchased vCenter.

Labels: KVM, Red Hat, VMware, Xen

Red Hat is definitively preparing for the imminent launch of its new enterprise virtualization offering based on KVM and the Qumranet technologies acquired in September 2008.

A very important piece of the puzzle is how Windows guest operating systems will perform on the Red Hat implementation of KVM.
Most virtual machines on the planet runs Windows, so if Red Hat doesn’t shine here it will have nothing concrete to compete against VMware, Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors.

In mid-July the company gave a hint on how it plans to manage this aspect of its strategy: it released version 1.0 of its KVM para-virtualization drivers for Windows guest OSes under the open source GPLv2 license.

The set includes the network driver (kvmnet) and the device block driver (viostor) and both already are certified against the Microsoft Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL).

Thanks to Linux-KVM.com for the news.

Labels: KVM, Red Hat, Releases

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

Oracle continues to stay mum about its integration plan for Oracle VM, Sun xVM Server and Virtual Iron hypervisors, but don’t hold anything when it’s time to talk about the new competitors.

Just two months ago the company dismissed the VMware virtual appliance initiative and its Marketplace, saying that it doesn’t contain anything but toy appliances.
One month later Oracle decided to clarify how the word co-opetition is not in its vocabulary, modifying the support policy to exclude every virtualization vendor that offer a hypervisor for x86/x64 architectures.

Today it’s time to hit Red Hat (and by some degrees Novell).
On its corporate blog last week Oracle highlighted its commitment to Xen and the open source:

…Oracle's Linux commitment began in 1998 with the first commercial database on Linux. Not only does Oracle run the whole business on Linux, but also run the base development on Linux for all our products. Today Oracle has over 9,000 developers working on Linux and provides Global Linux Support in over 100 countries…

The key point of this apparently candid post is about the quality of support that only Oracle can offer.
To support the statement Oracle points to another article about the reasons behind the launch of Oracle Unbreakable Linux:

Oracle Unbreakable Linux launched two years ago as a support program for existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) implementations or for new Oracle Enterprise Linux implementations. Oracle Unbreakable Linux program is about enterprise-class support that customers can't get (or is not available) from Red Hat.

…

Oracle brings the highest support quality, more value, and proven business practices to Linux support, including the following items Red Hat can't:

• 7500+ professionals providing 24x7, global support in over 145 countries
• Lifetime support policy (7+ years of general product support with the ability to extend to unlimited number of years)
• Premier backporting (Request backport of specific features eliminating pressure to upgrade with every update release)

…Due to dissatisfaction with Red Hat's quality of support as well as a desire to get more value, many users have switched from Red Hat Support to Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support…

The message is specifically directed to Red Hat because Red Hat is the company that promoted Xen for years and then decided a complete U turn by replacing the open source hypervisor with KVM.

Red Hat will (re)start competing with the other virtualization players in September when its new offering will become finally available.
And before any customer even think about jumping on the KVM bandwagon, Oracle wants to make sure that everybody knows how much better they are at support.

Labels: KVM, Oracle, Red Hat, Xen

We still don’t know anything about the new Red Hat virtualization portfolio based on KVM and Qumranet VDI technologies, despite a (claimed) oversubscribed beta program that nobody was able to access.

A key piece of this offering of course is Red Hat Enterprise Linux which was expected to drop Xen in favor of KVM as the default virtualization engine.
The release notes of the just announced beta of RHEL 5.4 confirm this.

The KVM version included in RHEL 5.4 will support RHEL 3.x, 4.x and 5.x guest OSes along with Windows XP, Server 2003 and Server 2008.
All of them are supported in 32 and 64bits, and each OS will be able to run without installing any para-virtualized (PV) driver, despite these components will be available as part of the distribution. 
No mention of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 which will hit the RTM next week.

The Red Hat customers using Xen are not entirely left in the cold but their life will be much harder now:

Xen based virtualization is fully supported. However, Xen-based virtualization requires a different version of the kernel to function. The KVM hypervisor can only be used with the regular (non-Xen) kernel.

While Xen and KVM may be installed on the same system, the default networking configuration for these are different. Users are strongly recommended to use one hypervisor at a time.

This beta shouldn’t run more than a couple of months as Red Hat plans to release the new products on September 1, according to LeMagIT.

Labels: KVM, Red Hat

Ten days ago Red Hat announced that its new, much awaited, virtualization offering based on KVM was in beta and that the beta program was oversubscribed.

The reality is that, as far as we know, Red Hat never announced the beta program or the details of its implementation of the Qumranet technology (acquired in September 2008), and never gave the opportunity to sign for it to the general public.
Still today there not a single bit of information about what Red Hat did in one year and a half after dropping Xen in favor of KVM.

Red Hat will take another two months to finally tell the world as LeMagIT revealed earlier today: the general availability of the new virtualization platform is in fact planned for September 1, 2009, which means during the VMware VMworld 2009.
Too bad that this year VMware is not particularly happy to have competitors showing their solutions on the exhibit floor.

Labels: KVM, Red Hat

In the past months virtualization.info highlighted several times how Cisco is silently using KVM as an alternative virtualization platform to VMware.
We always wondered why, considering the investment that Cisco made on VMware.

Now, finally we have an answer to give: Cisco invested in Qumranet too.

Qumranet is the startup that developed and maintained KVM up to the moment it was acquired by Red Hat.
And that’s why Red Hat had a minor but very relevant position during the launch of the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) despite its virtualization offering is pretty weak now.

The fact that Cisco invested in Qumranet is not widely known and we had to admit that even virtualization.info overlooked this key information so far.
How the investment links Cisco to Red Hat is not clear but it’s easy to guess that the upcoming Red Hat new virtualization portfolio based on KVM will have an early chance to be bundled with UCS.

Now VirtualLogix, the mobile virtualization startup where Cisco invested along with Intel, is the next most interesting company to watch.

Labels: Cisco, KVM, 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

While virtualization professionals are still trying to figure out how the renewed alliance between Microsoft and EMC will work on virtualization, another major event happens: Red Hat joins the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).

Pretty much like Cisco (why Cisco is here?), Citrix, Novell, Oracle, Sun, Unisys (why Unisys is here?), Virtual Iron and VMware did in the last few months (the SVVP was launched in June 2008) now also Red Hat had to accept the Microsoft conditions to offer concrete Windows support to its virtualized customers.
As side benefit, the Microsoft customers finally will be able to run Red Hat guest OSes on their Hyper-V hosts.

The agreement implies that:

• Red Hat will validate Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows 2000 Server SP42, and Windows Server 2008 guests on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies
• Microsoft will validate Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and 5.3 guests on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (all editions) and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008

Note that, as usual, Red Hat is not specifying which virtualization technology will be validated. As their new offering based on KVM is not ready yet, we may safely assume that this agreement is about the implementation of Xen currently part of Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Labels: Microsoft, Red Hat, Xen

While waiting to replace Xen with KVM somewhere in H1 2009, Red Hat continues to improve its current virtualization platform.

In the new Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.3, released this week, the company greatly extended the supported Xen limits:

• from 8 to 32 vCPUs
• from 64GB to 80GB vRAM
• from 32 to 126 pCPUs
• from 64GB to 1TB pRAM

Additionally the Xen included in RHEL 5.3 supports the Intel nested paging tables technology EPT featured inside the new Intel Core i7 (codename Nehalem) processors.

Labels: Red Hat, Xen

Yesterday the open source virtualization KVM reached another milestone: the build 83 now includes support for the AMD Input Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU) technology.

An IOMMU makes I/O virtualization more efficient by allowing VMMs to directly assign real devices to guest operating systems. It's not possible for a VMM to emulate the translation and protection functions of an IOMMU, because the VMM can't get between kernel-mode drivers running on the guest OS and the underlying hardware. So, in the absence of an IOMMU, VMMs instead present an emulated device to the guest OS. The VMM then translates the guest's requests, ultimately, into requests to the real driver running down on the host OS or on the hypervisor.

Less than one month ago the version of KVM that is included in the Linux Kernel 2.6.28 introduced the support for Intel IOMMU called VT-d.

Now both implementations are supported and the AMD patch will soon reach the mainstream kernel (probably 2.6.29).

Labels: KVM, Red Hat

The just released Kernel 2.6.28 includes more than 104 patches for the virtualization engine KVM, included in Linux since 2.6.20.

One of those patches is specially important as it allows the mapping of physical PCI device to a specific virtual machine through the Intel Virtualization for Directed I/O (VT-d) technology.

Intel introduced VT-d in early Q1 2006 but so far only Novell and Oracle supported it in their Xen implementations (as the virtualization.info Buyer’s Guide highlights).

The PCI direct access grants higher performance but lower flexibility in a virtual infrastructure: for instance a VM can only map as many devices as are physically present in the platform.
Nonetheless it’s a critical step to bring high-performance virtualization on consumer equipment (something often called client hypervisor) like laptops.

Red Hat, which is the main contributor of KVM after the acquisition of Qumranet, has all the interest to achieve the goal as the company executives clarified last month.

Meanwhile KVM continues to get new features: in its last build, KVM-82, the platform allows users to nested virtual machines when running on AMD CPUs.

Labels: KVM, Red Hat

Two weeks ago the Red Hat CEO hinted at his upcoming virtualization strategy but was careful enough to not say when KVM would be integrated into the company enterprise distribution.

Now CBR reports that Red Hat may be ready by the first half of 2009.

By that time the company will completely replace Xen with KVM in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but will continue to offer support for the former virtualization plaform for another seven years.

The company Vice President for EMEA, Werner Knoblich, insisted that KVM is better than Xen (or VMware ESX) when talking about large-scale deployments (thousands of virtual machines) because the virtualization engine fully leverages the Linux kernel capabilities while the bare-metal hypervisors cannot.

True or not, such comment highlights how Red Hat is looking at KVM for cloud computing much more than for server consolidation.

Labels: KVM, 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

At the end of last week AMD announced a breakthrough achievement: migrating a running virtual machine from a virtualization platform to another, each running different CPU brands.

Despite many progresses in this area (AMD-V Extended Migration and Intel Flex Migration), so far the only thing possible was to live migrate VMs between different CPU families of the same vendor.
AMD and Intel never cooperated as much to cross such boundary and in one case we are pretty sure that an Intel executive said that the thing would be unlikely to happen.

Now AMD has found a way to mask the CPU information and operate the migration from an Intel Xeon DP Quad Core E5420 to its own forthcoming 45nm Quad-Core Opteron.
To achieve the goal the company worked together with Red Hat so everybody would expect that the migration happened through Xen hypervisors. It’s not the case.

Red Hat fully embraced KVM as replacement of Xen in June and this is the virtualization platform that was used for the demo:

Labels: AMD, KVM, 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