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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Kris Buytaert

Red Hat announced Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor

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Today RedHat sent out 2 press releases obviously in an attempt to get Virtual visibility during VMWorld. Europe, The biggest news in those 2 press releases is the announcement of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor, or the RHEV . Red Hat announced their new strategy regarding to Virtualization which they call the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of products.

First in the Lineup is

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.

Well, we already knew that, given the fact that Fedora is heading KVM-wards and that they have to support Xen in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for the full life cycle of RHEL 5, therefore at least till 2014
KVM will enter the RHEL product line as part of RHEL 5.4, due to be released later this year
RedHat is also announcing 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

a framework based on LibVirt and 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.

With confirmation that the Qumranet code will be open sourced just as RedHat has done with all their other products so far.

And last but not least RedHat is launching a new standalone hypervisor : Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor

Which is

KVM unbundled from RHEL, in a package dubbed RHEV-H(ypervisor). RHEV-H is a stateless hypervisor, with a tight footprint of under 128MB, which presents a libvirt interface to the management tier. Enterprise servers will no longer need to go through an installation process, and will instead be able to boot RHEV-H from flash or a network server, and be able to immediately begin servicing virtual guests. This stateless model drives down OPEX and enables the scalability required by terascale grids, large datacenters and cloud class compute environments.

RedHat also announced that its broad ecosystem of applications tested and certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux are certified to run in a Red Hat virtualized platform with no modifications.

Citrix Open Sources VHD

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Simon Crosby just posted a blog announcing that Citrix is Open Sourcing the VHD support , their implementation of the of the Microsoft VHD virtual hard disk format to the Xen community for inclusion in the open source code base.

VHD is what XenServer uses to store file-based images, and according to Simon this code is considerably more robust and efficient than the qcow implementation that is in the tree today.

Simon lists different reasons for doing this

He states

First the various Xen implementations from the Linux vendors vary wildly in their support for virtual hard disk images, and the performance of their implementations.
Thus far we have yet to see any good implementations of VHD in the Linux vendor category. Cluttering users’ storage with raw image files without any of the benefits of the built-in capabilities for snapshotting, cloning etc that are fundamental primitives in any production virtualization environment, is just a bad idea. ,

Second, since the majority of VMs will be in the VHD format in future, we want to enable the ISV ecosystem to adopt the format and quickly deliver a rich set of add-on capabilities that allow users to be more productive in their virtual environments. VHD is more than just a VM format used by Hyper-V – it’s a delivery format from Microsoft for future versions of Windows. The format is documented publicly and the specification is available under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise program.

And to finish of he hopes the free implementation of the VHD format will accelerate the adoption of Windows in the cloud, I`m wondering how people plan on manage their Licence sprawl, but that’s just me 🙂

So which Virtualization vendor didn’t announce they would be Open Sourcing anything yet this year ? 🙂

XenServer for Free !

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With VMWorld Europe coming up,it seems Citrix is trying to get VMWare out of its warm cozy mansion, it seems they plan to announce next week that they won’t charge anymore for XenServer.

Altough the underlying Xen technology is fully Open source , Citrix doesn’t plan on fully opensourcing XenServer itselve yet. So how will they make their money then you’d ask ? By shipping a new managment framwork that will support both XenServer and the Microschoft Hyper-V platform.

It looks like Citrix is also planning to announce a similar agreement with Micro
soft as RedHat already did earlier this week.

So what will VMWare do as a reaction next week ?

RedHat Moves Closer To Microsoft

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Earlier this week Red Hat and Microsoft announced they were going to work closer together , mainly to ensure Virtualization Interoperability. Both RedHat and Microsoft will join the other’s virtualization validation/certification program and will provide coordinated technical support for their mutual server virtualization customers.

In short this means that Red Hat and Microsoft customers will have the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual servers on either host environment with configurations that will be tested and supported by both virtualization and operating system leaders.
The agreements contain no patent or open source license components. There are no financial clauses beyond simple certification testing fees. These are straightforward certification and validation agreements.

The key components of the announcement are as follows:

* Red Hat will validate Windows Server guests to be supported on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies.
* Microsoft will validate Red Hat Enterprise Linux server guests to be supported on Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server.
* Once each company completes testing, customers with valid support agreements will receive coordinated technical support for running Windows Server operating system virtualized on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization, and for running Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualized on Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server.

In a blogpost Scott Crenshaw writes
“Of course, it is also big news because it is rare that these two companies publicly work together. The companies continue to compete vigorously. But virtualization interoperability is very high on customers’ wish lists, and I’m pleased both companies have been able to respond in this cooperative fashion.”

To many the announcement does not come as a big surprise, after acquiring Qumranet, RedHat gained a lot of Microsoft aimed Virtualization knowledge, with this agreement it makes a step towards an even better supported Virtual desktop environment

Release: RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.3

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RedHat just announced the release of RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.3 which is available for immediate download from Red Hat Network. According to the company, with this update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, customers will receive a wide range of enhancements, including significantly increased virtualization scalability.

RedHat lists Increased scalability of virtualized x86-64 environments as it’s prominent new feature:

“This includes the industry-leading ability to support virtual servers with up to 32 virtual CPUs and 80GB of memory. Physical server limits have also been expanded to match the size of today’s latest hardware systems, with up to 126 CPUs and 1TB main memory. New features, such as support for Hugepage memory and Intel Extended Page Tables (EPT), dramatically improve the performance of virtual servers. For customers, these enhancements allow more and larger virtual systems to be configured on today’s powerful servers, thereby reducing costs. Additionally, more devices can be allocated to each virtual server (guest), enabling the virtualization of applications with heavy I/O requirements. ”

Amongst other improvements is support for the Quad Core Intel Core i7 (Nehalem) processors and the inclusion of OpenJDK

More info including a Video on their blog.

Xen Summit North America 2009

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The Xen.org community and Oracle are proud to announce the first major Xen event for 2009, Xen Summit North America at Oracle, February 24 – 25, 2009 at Oracle’s HQ in Redwood City, CA.

Global leaders developing for and using the open source Xen hypervisor will meet for 2 days of highly interactive discussion on product roadmaps, new features, and all things Xen related. With the increased
emphasis on the Xen Client Initiative, expect significant discussions on the port for the Xen hypervisor to all types of client devices.

Registration is only $215 and more event details are available at Xen.org. Included in the fee is an evening out at the Computer History Museum and other Xen Summit firsts!

If you have any questions, please contact Stephen Spector ([email protected]) for more information.