Red Hat To Integrate Virtualization

Jack Writes: Following community-based developed Fedora Core 4 which already includes Xen, Xensource's open source hypervisor, Red Hat has recently announced that it will release a beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5), which will also include support for virtualization. The company will thus be able to better compete on the servers market against companies that have already implemented this technology, such as Novell.

During a launch today in San Francisco, company executives presented detailed plans for creating a Red Hat virtualization environment and collaborating with partners such as AMD, Intel, Network Appliance and XenSource to simplify virtualization deployment for customers.

Red Hat announced it will provide tools, services and technology previews that let customers and partners take advantage of the resources at the low costs and maximum efficiency.

"Conservative estimates show that servers typically operate at between 15 and 25 percent of CPU capacity, but with virtualization that could improved to 80 percent", said Brian Stevens, CTO at Red Hat.

"Our customers, who already see Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the choice for lower cost of ownership, will be able to ride this next wave of virtualization to further reduce costs and increase operational efficiency. Red Hat's strategy is to methodically target and reduce every cost driver associated with deploying IT infrastructure, we believe integrated virtualization will be a major milestone in this effort", he added.

The integrated virtualization technology includes features such as: a complete platform to implement server consolidation, reducing costs and improving service levels; a comprehensive development and QA environment, which allows developers to substantially reduce the time and complexity of writing and testing code on diverse target systems; support for hardware abstraction, which allows IT managers to reap the benefits of the latest hardware using existing software stacks, without the expense of extensive qualification and migration processes.

This month Red Hat will also make Fedora Core 5 available and its users will be able to see a preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization technology. This summer, Red Hat plans to make virtualization Migration and Assessment Services available along with an Enterprise virtualization beta.

"By the end of this year the integration of Xen into Red Hat Enterprise Linux will result in several important customer benefits, including better support for consolidation; more flexible lifecycle management; and improved workload management and availability", said Tony Iams, Vice President of System Software Research at Ideas International, Inc. "Further, by making Xen a pervasive part of its Linux distribution, Red Hat will drive virtualization deeply into the mainstream."

The fifth version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is scheduled to be completely available for general use at the end of 2006 and will have full support for integrated virtualization.