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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.

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

KVM Lives On At Red Hat, So Now What?

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Over a year after the first big Open Source Virtualization acquisition, Citrix Acquiring Xensource, the next industry shaking acquisition is a fact. Red Hat has reeled in Virtualization startup Qumranet, While RedHat had already announced that they were going to support both KVM and Xen in their product range , taking over Qumranet for some people sounds like a really strange thing to do , afterall apart from its work on KVM as the underlying opensource component of their product, Qumranet is a pretty proprietary software company.

Qumranet understood that the Bare Metal Low Layer virtualization layer was not going to bring them any money any day soon. There were going to be different Free and free alternative Virtualization layers out there anyhow so why keeping theirs secret rather than having it flourish as a community product and contribute back to the linux kernel community while at it.

On the other hand the products of Qumranet were closed, altough based on Linux their business was in selling a VDI solution to bigger customers. The question now becomes how this kind of product range will fit into RedHat’s tradidional Open Source offering. Red Hat has a long history of opensourcing everything they do. Obviously there is Redhat Linux, Jboss but also
the proprietary directory server they bought from Netscape which they opensourced . Sometimes it takes a while, like with their Satellite product, but they have a good track record here. So most parts of the SolidIce product line will be opensourced , but will they grow a community ?

Lots of people ask themselves if RedHat was interrested in the VDI infrastructure or did the just want to have the KVM Kernel developers on board. The fact is that they have a direct entry into managing Windows desktops , a market previously closed for themAnd that makes it an interresting move. As of now, managing a windows box is just managing a file on a Linux server, easy to copy, easy to replace.

With RedHat clearly preferring KVM over Xen in the future. What’s going to happen with Xen in the other distributions.
The 451 group reports that
“Novell insists Xen is its hypervisor of choice and it remains committed to the virtualization software and project.”,
but as we all know .. Novell will be working on other interoperability challenges too.

With Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux being a RedHat derivate the future of Virtualization in Unbreakable becomes an interresting topic.
Oracle clearly choose the Xen platform as their favourite virtualization technology earlier. And given the fact that it will be hosting the next
North American Xen summit , Oracle seems to plan on continuing to build their platform on Xen.

To close of there’s also the question of people at Qumranet, Qumranet was cofounded by serial virtualization enterpreneur Moshe Bar who previously had also cofouned Qlusters and Xensource What’s he going to do , will he stay around at RedHat or will he refocus to his other startup Sullego.

In a couple of weeks Xensource will celebrate it’s first anniversary at Citrix , let’s see what happens then …

RedHat Picks Up Qumranet

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According to Globes, RedHat has acquired Qumranet (confirmed via press release)

“Redhat announced its acquisition of Israeli virtualization start-up Qumranet Inc. for about $100 million, ending a long period of rumors. This is Red Hat’s first acquisition in Israel, and it will turn the Linux software company into a market leader in virtualization. Qumranet will become Red Hat’s R&D center in Israel.”

Best known Qumranet co-founders are Benny Schnaider, Moshe Bar, Both are well known, with track records ath Cisco ,PentaCom and P-Cube, and more interesting Qlusters and XenSource (now Citrix)

“Benny Schaider, and Moshe Bar are expected to head Red Hat’s Israeli R&D after the acquisition. Qumranet has 65 employees worldwide, mostly R&D staff in Israel. The company has raised $20 million in two financing rounds from its founders, Sequoia Capital, Northwest Venture Partners, and Cisco. The company still has cash from its latest financing round, which was held in January. ”

This shines a totally different light on the irrational discussion if RedHat should be Acquired by VMWare .

RedHat now owns one of the fastest growing Virtualization technologies around : KVM
RedHat had already chosen for stronger support of KVM, but with todays evolution one has to start thinking about the future of Xen in the leading Linux distribution. In one day RedHat stepped from being just an integrator of different virtualization technologies to one of the leading Virtualization Vendors.

Qumranet Announces Craig Bauman as Vice President of Sales and Channel Chief

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Qumranet, with its hosted desktop virtualization product, Solid ICE, announced that Craig Bauman has joined the company as the vice president of sales and channels. Bauman will be responsible for launching the Qumranet Partner Program and leading the sales organization through its recent grow th stage.

Buaman joins Qumranet from TriActive. Prior to joining TriActive, Bauman was an enterprise sales director at Microsoft responsible for sales of the Windows enterprise management products in the U.S. and Canada driving sales growth. Bauman was also a key stakeholder in driving Microsoft’s acquisitions of AssetMetrix and Softricity.

Additionally, he has held sales leadership roles at Altiris (now Symantec) assisting
in the successful IPO and helping to grow the company from $10 million to $200 million revenues, along with a 300 percent increase in partner-led sales.

“Since launching Solid ICE several months ago, and with interest in desktop virtuali
zation soaring, it’s vital to get the right people in place to take advantage of these opportunities,” said Rami Tamir, president and co-founder, Qumranet. “Craig has been a major contributor to the virtualization and systems management industry and we
are honored to have him join our team.”

Qumranet is also the maintainer of the open source virtualization project KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine)

Red Hat Unveils Virtualization Strategy At Boston Summit

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Today at Red Hat Summit in Boston, two of Red Hat’s emerging technology engineers, Dan Barrange and Richard Jones, presented the new tool sets that their team has developed for work with Xen virtual machines (VMs). It includes command line utilities, which will become part of the oVirt tool set, a web-based virtual machine management console built using Ruby on Rails.

oVirt uses Red Hat’s open source libvirt management framework that provides hypervisor-agnostic management interfacing, allowing the same tools to manage multiple different hypervisors. Libvirt already supports six hypervisors : Xen, KVM, QEMU, OpenVZ, Linux Containers (LVX) and Solaris LDoms.

The company also announced that its own embedded, lightweight, stand-alone hypervisor and accompanying management console are available in beta right now. Red Hat’s new Linux hypervisor hosts both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Rather than base the software on the open-source Xen hypervisor, Red Hat has chosen the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) project, which is already used by the major Linux OSs as the default server virtualization package. Another key difference: while Xen works well with Linux, it’s an add-on. KVM, on the other hand, is an integral part of Linux.

Read more about Red Hat’s virtualization announcements here.