It seems Red Had is shifting their focus from Xen as their virtualization platform to KVM. Their new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualizaiton solution is based on KVM. It seems that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualizaiton Solution, when combined with their new management tool called RHEV-M will offer many advanced features. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Solution seems to successfully copy many of VMware and other Virtualization vendors features like: 1- Live Migration 2- Load Distribution 3- Clustering & High Availability 4- Memory over Commitment 5- Transparent Memory Page sharing 6- Virtual Machine Snapshot 7- Host maintenance mode & many other feature. If you have been using VMware for a while all these features should be familiar to you, though Red Hat are promising that their pricing model will be much cheaper than VMware. I have not got to see Red Hat pricing yet, and it will be too early to compare the two products pricing. Before sharing a video of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization with you, I believe its worth to mention that reading Red Hat data sheet of the product as well watching their marketing demo video make Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization seem too good to be true for the kind of pricing Red hat is promising to offer. Its worth to note there is one catch to this product at the moment, its not as easy to setup as you expect unless you are a Red Hat guru. In another words if you are not a Red Hat guru & never had setup a Red Hat cluster & GFS, then Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Solution will be a steep learning curve for you. I really hope Red Hat will look into making their system setup easier and totally independent of how they currently setup clustering. I believe it should be some how included in RHEV-M interface instead of having to use the Red Hat Clustering Interfaces. That have been said I hope you enjoy the video below: : If yo u care to learn more about the product, you might want to look at the great break out session published at: http://www.virtualization.info/2009/09/red-hat-releases-enterprise-linux-54.html

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Redhat has announced an interesting change in their virtualization strategy. They seems to dump Xen for KVM in their upcoming releases. This will be a happy news for a lot of open source lovers. As Citrix & Microsoft are controlling the way Xen is evolving, they would rather a real open source alternative. Redhat has a good announcement found at Red Hat Sets Its Virtualization Agenda clearing up the confusion of their Virtualization Strategy after they had obtained Qumranet in the last quarter of 2008.

A brief of the planned changes quoted from Redhat annoucement is below:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Red Hat’s strategic direction for the future development of its virtualization product portfolio is based on KVM, making Red Hat the only virtualization vendor leveraging technology that is developed as part of the Linux operating system. Existing Xen-based deployments will continue to be supported for the full lifetime of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and Red Hat will provide a variety of tools and services to enable customers to migrate from their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Xen deployment to KVM.
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers: A new, richly featured virtualization management solution for servers that will be the first open source product in the industry to allow fully integrated management across virtual servers and virtual desktops, featuring Live Migration, High Availability, System Scheduler, Power Manager, Image manager, Snapshots, thin provisioning, monitoring and reporting. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers will be able to manage both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 hosts, as well as the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor.
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops: A new management system for virtual desktops that will deliver industry-leading VDI cost-performance for both Linux and Windows desktops, based on Qumranet’s SolidICE and using SPICE remote rendering technology.
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor: A new standalone hypervisor designed to be ideal for Red Hat’s partners and customers to lay down a standard, lightweight, high-performance virtualization foundation for guest environments.

Our team got excited about the Red Hat move, as this will be the second real competing open source Virtualization Software in the market. We are depating how this move will affect XenServer Enterprise which has been released for free by Citrix & how it will get affected by it. How will VMware reply to KVM? How will Hyper-V be affected. All these questions are left for the time to answer in the near future. So keep testing the new KVM on your Agenda.