Red Hat boosts enterprise virtualisation portfolio
Red Hat has released new components in its enterprise virtualisation portfolio, including a standalone hypervisor and management platform for servers.
Availability of the Virtualisation Hypervisor and Virtualisation Manager for Servers products was announced on Tuesday. The products follow the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4, which incorporated the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, in September.
"Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation is truly differentiated from other virtualisation solutions as it inherits the powerful functionality, hardware support and certification of Red Hat Enterprise Linux," Red Hat product and technology chief Paul Cormier said in a statement.
Cormier added that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation would give software and hardware vendors, as well as customers, "the opportunity to seamlessly move applications and hardware platforms from bare metal computing to virtualised computing to cloud computing while maintaining certifications".
The standalone hypervisor released on Tuesday is designed to host Linux and Windows virtual servers and desktops. Pitched at companies looking to roll out cloud deployments, it uses KVM technology and allows for enterprise features such as live migration.
Virtualisation Manager for Servers allows the configuration, provisioning and management of virtualised Linux and Windows servers. The platform's features include high availability, live migration and storage management.
Red Hat first announced its enterprise virtualisation portfolio plans in February, when it said it would use the KVM technology it had acquired along with Qumranet in September 2008 to boost power management, performance and security in its products. That announcement marked a shift for Red Hat away from the Xen hypervisor.
Beta versions of the new server hypervisor and virtualisation manager were released in June. Hardware firms including Cisco, HP and IBM have been working with Red Hat on optimising the Enterprise Virtualisation for Servers products for their systems, while large enterprise customers such as NTT Communications, Qualcomm and Swisscom have also been trying out the betas.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation for Desktops, which was also trailed in February, is still in its private beta phase according to Red Hat, with general availability scheduled for "early 2010".