Virtualization roadmap

With plans to offer customers a complete set of virtualization solutions allowing the entire spectrum of enterprise workloads to run on one common infrastructure, Red Hat has announced the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of products, which will be made available by the end of 2009, including:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4

  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 Hypervisor

  A new standalone hypervisor based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 with KVM, designed to be ideal for Red Hat's partners and customers to lay down a standard, lightweight, high-performance virtualization foundation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows guest environments.

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers

  A new, richly featured virtualization management solution for servers that will allow fully integrated, centralized management of 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 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.

FAQs

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What is Red Hat announcing?

Red Hat is announcing the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, which includes KVM hypervisor technology. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is the technological foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, a portfolio of virtualization products for server and desktop virtualization. Additional products in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio will be available later this year.

How is this different from previous announcements?

Red Hat is delivering the technology foundation of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization product portfolio with the announcement of the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.

Red Hat announced in February 2009 a major expansion of its virtualization product portfolio, under the "Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization" brand name. The portfolio enables Red Hat solutions to meet the needs of a broad cross-section of the enterprise IT market, and will accelerate and simplify the adoption of virtualization. The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization products will include:

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform

In summary, we are building on the success of the virtualization provided by Red Hat Enterprise Linux over the past two years to deliver new products that meet the needs of new markets.

Can you outline how customers will use Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization hypervisor products? Who will use them and why?

Red Hat will deliver hypervisor technology in two product offerings:

• Integrated into the market-leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux product family (including Advanced Platform). This is available now with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4. It is a continuation of the existing product model, but provides customers with the latest, next-generation hypervisor technology (KVM). This will remain Red Hat's flagship operating system environment, designed for enterprise-class application deployments and for hosting Microsoft Windows and Linux virtual guests. Red Hat Enterprise Linux used as a hypervisor will also feature either four or unlimited Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests entitlements, based on the edition.
• As a new, lightweight, small footprint, easily managed, standalone hypervisor - Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor. This product is a thin virtualization layer designed to be deployed across a customer's server infrastructure, virtualizing the hardware compute resources. With this standardized virtual hardware environment customers will be able to deploy standardized operating system guests, Microsoft Windows or Linux (both licensed separately), easily, quickly, and with maximum flexibility.

What is Red Hat's position in the virtualization market? How will customers benefit?

The virtualization market is dominated today by VMware, while Microsoft's recently released Hyper-V solution is destined to be a market leader. Meanwhile the open source development model has been delivering virtualization technologies for the past two years.

Red Hat is taking open source virtualization to the next level, based on new core technology and new centralized management capabilities. So Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization solutions will benefit customers in the same way as other open source solutions, by offering: uncompromising technology, flexible deployment, world-class services, elimination of vendor lock-in, all coupled with unbeatable price/performance.

What underlying technologies are the new solutions based on?

At the heart of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio are the technologies that were included with Red Hat's acquisition of Qumranet, Inc. in September 2008. These cover three distinct areas:

• The KVM hypervisor.KVM is the leading open source hypervisor - highly efficient and a core component of the Linux kernel. A principal feature of KVM is that it inherently benefits from all other Linux developments so that, for example, new hardware, security and performance features are immediately available in virtualized environments.
• The SPICE protocol.SPICE is a high performance network protocol for use in VDI deployments, replacing slow, proprietary protocols such as RDP and ICA. With SPICE-based VDI, desktop users are able to enjoy the same performance and capabilities as a traditional local desktop in a secure, centrally managed environment.
• Management infrastructure.Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization technologies include a GUI-based centralized virtualization management capability, which provides a comprehensive range of features, including: resource management, live migrations, rapid provisioning, etc.

What is Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers?

A major component of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio is the new virtualization management products. These are designed to provide state-of-the-art virtualization management for even the largest deployments. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers includes:

• High Availability: Quickly configure guests for fault tolerance
• Live Migration: Move virtual machines between physical hosts without interruption
• System Scheduler: Create policies to dynamically balance compute resources
• Power Saver: Create policies to conserve power and cooling costs
• Image Manager: Create/manage/provision virtual machine, create snapshots, etc.
• Storage virtualization: Consistently access common storage from any server
• The ability to easily manage thousands of servers

What are you doing with the current Xen hypervisor?

There are two important components to this answer:

• Red Hat's commitment to its customers is to provide them with the best available technology. Choosing Red Hat means choosing the best.
• Red Hat's commitment to support its currently shipping products and technologies is absolute.

When Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was released in March 2007, it included virtualization based on the Xen hypervisor. This was the best technology available at the time. It is mature and robust, and being successfully deployed by customers today. Existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Xen-based deployments will continue to be supported for the full lifetime of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, until at least 2014, 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.

At the same time, the KVM hypervisor has demonstrated that it offers superior capabilities when compared to Xen, so it will be the strategic direction for the future development of our virtualization product portfolio.

What happens to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform once the new products are available for sale?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform can function as a hypervisor managed by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager, and will offer the same virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux guest entitlements as it does today.

In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform will remain Red Hat's flagship operating system product. As a superset of the base Red Hat Enterprise Linux product, Advanced Platform will continue as the premium operating system product in the portfolio running mission critical applications for thousands of enterprise datacenters.

When will the products be available?

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization products will be made available later this year.