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The Future of Xen At Red Hat

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As you might know, most of the development for the upcoming Red Hat releases is happening in the Fedora project, so if you want to keep an eye on what’s going to happen in future RedHat releases Fedora is a good place to look.

Reuven pointed out that the next Fedora release (Fedora 10) won’t have Dom0 support.

This however is not yet the strategic decision from Redhat after buying Qumranet and thus KVM. But merely a lack of time before the release has to ship.

Xen typically is being developed with an older 2.6.18 Linux kernel release and forward porting of these features is a time consuming effort. The typical kernel-xen package in Fedora has always been a bit behind on the kernel package
So the slow introduction of paravirt_ops, is keeping Dom0 support out of Fedora 10.

The idea behind paravirt_ops is to build a kernel structure that gives an interface to a virtualization layer, any virtualization layer, it allows the kernel to run on both a hypervisor and the actual hardware. Initial support for Xen, VMware and KVM is available.

Today running Fedora 10 as a host for your virtual machines will give you KVM as your only option. However Fedora 11 should solve that problem again. But then again, you probably don’t want to be running Fedora in a production environment, RedHat Enterprise or CentOS 5 are a much more viable alternative

Scalent Brings Combined Virtual and Bare Metal Management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

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Scalent Systems, provider of real-time Management & Automation software for large data centers, and Red Hat today announced Scalent’s support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Xen. The combined solution extends virtualization and data center automation beyond hypervisors, to bare metal servers, network and storage connectivity.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 provides IT managers unprecedented levels of operational flexibility, via a comprehensive suite of open source server applications and virtualization capabilities . Scalent V/OE enables IT managers to rapidly provision entire virtual or bare metal servers and associated storage and network topologies, yielding higher asset utilization and dramatically lower costs.

Scalent’s software provides real time data center management, automation, and virtualization across physical and virtual servers, networks, and storage. Highly complementary to Red Hat’s Linux Automation efforts, the Scalent V/OE software enables data centers to react in real-time to changing business needs by shifting workloads and connectivity.

The result: data centers can transition between different configurations – or from bare metal to live, connected servers – in five minutes or less, without physical intervention.

Scalent’s software complements Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Linux Automation capabilities by delivering fully transparent management & automation of software workloads and connectivity across bare metal and virtual environments, including:

  • Simple, transparent deployment, automation, and management of both virtual and physical servers, network connectivity and storage access
  • Cost-effective high availability and server failover solutions, through Scalent’s N+1 technology leveraging existing IT assets
  • Fully-automated disaster recovery across data centers, through Scalent’s disaster recovery technology;
  • Creation of server pools that enable server rightsizing and scalability through dynamic repurposing; and
  • Effective chargeback capabilities, logical, secure partitioning, and named pools of resources for rapid change of operational lab or production environments.

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.

What’s All This Talk About VMware Buying Red Hat?

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We were looking at the swirling rumors coming in about a potential acquisition of Red Hat by VMware, and ultimately decided not to cover the rumor because … well because it seems so irrational.

But is that actually so?

This is what BusinessWeek wrote:

Speculation is rife that the company (Red Hat) is a takeover target. “It makes no sense that they’re still hanging out there,” says Eric Gebaide, a managing director at investment bank Innovation Advisors.

One possible suitor is virtualization software company VMware, which some industry executives says is on the lookout for an operating system to add to its portfolio. Former VMware CEO Diane Greene, ousted by her board in July, had set up meetings with Red Hat in part to position VMware as friendly to open source and possibly as a prelude to a buyout discussion, according to a person familiar with the conversations. Representatives of both companies declined to comment.

Ostatic followed up with a snapshot analysis, and now the folks over at Cnet News.com are trying to make sense of such an acquisition.

Ostatic concludes in its post:

A combination of VMware virtualization and a proven, popular operating system could pave the way for a future of healthy competition for VMware with other operating systems that bundle virtualization. I wouldn’t be surprised to see both VMware and Red Hat pursue all of this.

Meanwhile Cnet’s Matt Asay contradicts:

I would think this trend cuts the other way. Red Hat (and Novell) likely see virtualization’s commoditization as a reason to push the knife deeper into VMware. Being acquired by an important but commoditized feature of their operating systems doesn’t sound appealing to me…

What do you think?

VMware

Red Hat

Red Hat Embraces AMD Virtualization Capabilities In HP Servers

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Red Hat today announced its support for virtualization capabilities offered by AMD processors in new HP servers.

Red Hat

The company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 platform supports AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing technology, for more efficient use of memory management on Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. HP is now offering systems equipped with these processors in its HP ProLiant DL585 G5 servers, Red Hat said. Also, support for virtual guests configured with more than four CPUs has now been added.

“Red Hat and AMD have worked very closely with the open source community to ensure that full support for Rapid Virtualization Indexing is available with the first Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based systems to be offered by a leading hardware OEM,” said Earl Stahl, vice president, Software Development at AMD. “We’ve been able to ensure that customers can reap the benefits of this new virtualization technology right away. We have been delighted with the excellent performance that Red Hat Enterprise Linux has achieved. Red Hat, AMD and HP customers now have available one of the fastest and most scalable virtualization platforms on the market today.”

“Red Hat also is offering para-virtualized device drivers to make I/O workloads in virtual guests perform close to the bare-metal performance of the system”, said Doug Shakshober, senior consulting engineer at Red Hat.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 has been shipping since November 2007.

[Source: Test Center Daily]