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Oracle To Buy Virtual Iron?

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The rumour is spreading , but so far no official feedback from Oracle.

Local Techwire reports that there are talks between Oracle and Virtual Iron ongoing and that Oracle is aiming at Virtual Iron to expand its server virtualization management platform.

According to Local Techwire Katherine Egbert, a Jefferies & Company analyst who closely follows Red Hat, say that

It’s likely Oracle would buy Virtual Iron to improve its prospects in the rapidly growing server virtualization management market and to keep Virtual Iron technology out of competitive hands,

and note that Virtual Iron is the “fifth-largest server virtualization vendor.”

She also noted that Virtual Iron’s technology is “complementary to Oracle Virtual Machine” while also cheaper than market leader VMware.

Virtual Iron, according to TechVibes founded in 2003 , already has a questionable Virtualization History, as I wrote earlier in Open Source Virtualization Today , Virtual Iron initially had a Single Server Image implementation they sold under the Virtual Iron VFe productname , but somewhere in 2005 they changed gears and became the supplier of a server virtualization & virtual infrastructure management solution , a Virtualization Solution based on Open Source Technologies, or back then a Xen Management Solution.

Fact is that when RedHat moves towards KVM , it leaves a gap to fill for Oracle which with OracleVM today is putting it’s eggs in the Xen basket. Oracle just hosted the Xen Summit and has Wim Coekaerts on the Xen Advisory Board. So adding a company like Virtual Iron to it’s portofolio to manage those Xen based VM’s absolutely makes sense.

If or when that will happen is still the question 🙂

But we’ll keep you posted..

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

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.

Virtuize Partners With RedHat

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Virtuize, Inc announced yesterday that it has partnered with Redhat, Inc to deliver Redhat’s Virtualization services to its customers. This expands Virtuize, Inc’s Open Source Virtualization portfolio.

Virtuize was formed in 2008 by industry specialists with over 25 years of consolidated experience to specialize in Virtualization and Cloud Computing Solutions.

More information about RedHat’s Virtualization Portofolio is on their site : www.redhat.com

The End of Neverland, What Neverland ?

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Stop the presses, RedHat and AMD just announced the end of Neverland.

The big News seems to be that RedHat and AMD managed to do Live migration of a virtual machine between 2 different CPU Vendors.

Now given my age and my starting alzheimer, LinuxKongress 2005 in Hamburg seems like ages ago,
As a speaker giving my Automating Xen Deployments talk early on the first conference day , I flew in the day before the conference and I needed some network connectivity so I sneeked into Ian Pratt’s tutorial about Xen. I remember sitting between Heinz Mauelshagen and my colegue Peter Leemans, Heinz was playing with SMP guests on a non SMP host and tried to figure out the limits.

If I recall correctly at the end of his session Ian was explaining Live Migration and demoing it by migrating a small virtual machine around between laptops of people in the front rows of the audience , Laptops from different architectures and from there started a discussion about CPU feature checking.

I asked around and some people actually remember parts of the discussion and the demo.

So for me , when RedHat and AMD claim today they have achieved in something new that was Never going to be implement they are either focusing on nitty details, like migrating from 2 brand new CPU’s to each other and forgetting the fundaments already existed for ages or just trying to get some positive news out of the door. In which they succeeded.

But I`m looking out for the next step in virtualization , not just mashups of things we’ve all been doing before, or things that are really similar to existing things.