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Red Hat Launches Virtual Storage Appliance For Amazon Web Services

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Red Hat today announced the availability of the Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that is built on the former Gluster technology that the company acquired in October 2011.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance enables organizations to extend their datacenter storage to the cloud. With the appliance, users have the ability to aggregate both Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, creating a highly available virtualized storage pool that offers enhanced scalability and performance in the cloud.

This news comes on the heels of Red Hat’s announcement of its Storage Software Appliance in December 2011.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS features both synchronous and asynchronous file replication, assuring data availability across AWS Availability Zones. Synchronous replication provides users with redundancy and protection within a single datacenter or multiple datacenters and availability zones in a region, while asynchronous geo-replication offers data availability across all AWS Regions.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance is POSIX-compliant, meaning that no application modifications are required for data access in the cloud.

Release: Red Hat Network Sattelite 5.3

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Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3, the latest version of Red Hat’s on-premises systems management solution that provides software updates, configuration management, provisioning and monitoring across both physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers.

Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 is globally available today and is automatically delivered to customers with a Red Hat Network Satellite subscription. The availability of Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 marks the first release based off of the open source project Spacewalk, announced in June 2008.

Virtualization is a key requirement in many IT environments today, and with Red Hat Network Satellite, a systems administrator only needs one console to update, provision and monitor both their physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. Red Hat Network Satellite includes virtual platform management capabilities that allow customers to create and entitle Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems with the ability to install the same systems profiles physically and virtually in a repeatable, centrally managed way. Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 supports both KVM and Xen virtualization technologies. Red Hat Network Satellite abstracts virtualization technology from administrators, freeing up their time to focus on higher value-add projects.

With Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3, customers are also offered bottom-line benefits through the enhancements included in the latest version of the systems management solution. These enhancements include increased flexibility and faster provisioning setups with the incorporation of more mature open source Cobbler technology in the product’s underlying provisioning architecture. In addition, with Satellite 5.3, customers receive powerful open source technologies backed by the Red Hat subscription, delivering the feature-richness of the community development model combined with the commercial support to run mission-critical applications in the enterprise.

Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 also enables customers to manage large deployments more easily and with comparable performance to smaller deployments due to enhanced scalability improvements, such as code optimization, designed to enable faster execution when managing multiple systems. Customers also benefit from content sharing between Satellite servers that is now faster and provides greater consistency with the ability to share content between different organizations in the Satellite server given Satellite’s improved multi-tenancy capabilities and inter-Satellite synchronization improvements. Satellite can also now be more easily and smoothly integrated into customers’ existing automated processes given its improved open and extensible APIs. These enhancements in Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 can ultimately save enterprises time and money while delivering a more consistent operating environment that helps to drive down long-term operational expenses.

Red Hat, HP Optimize RH Enterprise Virtualization for HP BladeSystem Matrix

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Red Hat and HP today expanded their collaboration to drive the next generation of converged server, storage and networking infrastructure solutions with the launch of open source software designed to improve administrator productivity, lower costs and maximize resource utilization.

Yesterday, Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, the foundation of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is now available on HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant servers. With this combination, customers can take advantage of an open source, standards-based virtual infrastructure that provides scalability and security capabilities. Additionally, enterprises will be able to leverage management capabilities offered by both companies. In the future, customers can expect increasing levels of management integration between the system and operating environment to further drive administrator productivity.

The HP BladeSystem Matrix is a “cloud infrastructure in a box” that brings the economics, scalability and response times of the cloud to diverse applications across customers` data centers.

Customers can obtain increased performance improvement and cost savings by deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware on HP ProLiant G6 platforms. They also can get a single point of accountability for the purchase and support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP systems. With its comprehensive range of world-class support services, HP offers customers complete confidence to grow their businesses while controlling costs.

KVM News In Short

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Over the past couple of weeks different new releases of KVM and related software saw the light . Virt-manager 0.8.0 was officially announced the most interesting new feature probably being the the Clone VM wizard but also a bunch of system tray icons for smooth desktop integration and CPU pinning support are very interesting.

Daniel Berrange noticed that Redhat has released windows kvm virtio drivers under GPLv2 This means that apart from the paravirtual network drivers that were already available now also the paravirtual block device drivers are available

It shows that RedHat is working towards a much more featureful KVM management framework into their upcoming RHEL release as they also updated their virtualization management layer libvirt 0.7.0. Most interesting new features include initial VMWare ESX driver support, added support for VBox 3 , QEmu hotplug network card support , and improved storage management .

If you have a recent Fedora 11 box and you want to test all these new features, you might want to be enable the fedora-virt-preview repository

[virt-preview]
name=Virtualization Rawhide for Fedora 11
baseurl=http://markmc.fedorapeople.org/virt-preview/f11/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

RHEL 5.4 will feature KVM

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July 1st marked the availability of the first Beta version of what will eventually become Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (RHEL) , for Virtualization.com readers the most important part of this upcoming release is with no doubt the full shift from Xen to KVM. When late last year RedHat picked up Qumranet it was clear that they weren’t going to gamble on 2 horses (Xen and KVM) and that for RedHat KVM was their platform of choice

Where initially KVM was considered for a lot of people as the Desktop Virtualization platform of the future , RedHat is now placing it in the center of their Enterprise Linux distribution.

But they aren’t ready yet .. when RedHat travels around the globe demoing it’s Virtualization platform it got from Qumranet is often critized for not having fully opened the code yet and and that their management platform still requires people to use a windows only management interface (much like Xensource had with one 3.X release) But with RedHat’s promise to open source Qumranet’s code that is probably only a matter of time.

The bigger question however is that of the migration from Xen to KVM. Different people have already build their toolchain, methods and procedures around working with Xen, some of them have based it on LibVirt, others on the Xen tools themselves, they are really happy about the Xen framework but they are really happy about a RHEL based platform also. Given it’s long term commitments RedHat has to provide Xen for a long time to come.

CentOS and Unbreakable, being Rebuilds of RHEL will have automatically KVM support included , but Oracle already showed the world it is aiming it’s arrows at Xen.

So how does the RedHat userbase feel about this .. are they going to follow RedHat to KVM or are they going to stay with their trusted and familiar Xen platform ?

Red Hat Launches Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program

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Red Hat today announced the Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program, designed to simplify and expand the adoption of cloud computing by enterprise customers. The program enables industry leaders in cloud computing to become certified to offer Red Hat technology solutions. Premier Cloud Provider Partners will collaborate with Red Hat on technical support, security updates, hardware certification, sales and marketing and business models. As part of the announcement today, cloud computing pioneer Amazon Web Services will extend its technology relationship with Red Hat to become the first Red Hat Premier Cloud Provider Partner.

The Red Hat Premier Cloud Provider Program has been established to address the increased interest in cloud computing from Red Hat customers, both in building virtualized internal infrastructure systems and extending their applications into the clouds. Red Hat customers seek the flexibility to transfer and use Red Hat subscriptions on premise and/or in cloud environments, with support and compatibility. Red Hat customers have also requested the ability to rent elastic computing by-the-hour with access to consistent, technical support, security updates and compatibility with existing IT resources. This program aims to provide more flexibility for Red Hat customers when developing and deploying their applications.

In addition to customers, Red Hat has witnessed growing ISV partner interest in providing cloud offerings based on their applications certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and/or JBoss Enterprise Middleware. As part of its new program, Red Hat will work with customers to identify secure, optimized and supported cloud providers, and will work with ISVs to help enable delivery of cloud offerings with an on-ramp program that spans technology, business and support models.

Building on the experience of delivering the first supported operating system and first supported middleware offering for Amazon Web Services, Red Hat is now growing its relationship by choosing Amazon Web Services as the first member of the Premier Cloud Provider Program.