Virtualization Team

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

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: