Red Hat sets virtualisation agenda
ConvergenceAsia staff
24/02/2009

Open source solutions provider Red Hat has announced its virtualisation strategy for 2009 and beyond, outlining plans to significantly expand and enhance its server, client and management products to enable ubiquitous adoption of virtualisation across the enterprise.

Leveraging a strong ecosystem of hardware and software partners, the company will focus on breaking down barriers to reliable, large-scale virtualisation deployment. Virtualisation provides a foundational component of Red Hat's broader strategy to deliver flexible cloud computing environments with the ability to deploy any application, anywhere, at anytime.

As part of Red Hat’s strategy to offer customers a complete set of virtualisation solutions that allows the entire spectrum of enterprise workloads to run on one common infrastructure, it announces the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation portfolio of products, including four primary components:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Red Hat’s strategic direction for the future development of its virtualisation product portfolio is based on KVM, making Red Hat the only virtualisation 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.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation Manager for Servers: A new, richly featured virtualisation 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 Virtualisation Manager for Servers will be able to manage both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 hosts, as well as the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation Hypervisor.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation 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.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation Hypervisor: A new standalone hypervisor designed to be ideal for Red Hat’s partners and customers to lay down a standard, lightweight, high-performance virtualisation foundation for guest environments.

Red Hat plans for the new virtualisation products in Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualisation suite to be delivered sequentially over the next three to 18 months, with delivery dates beginning in the middle of 2009.

“With Red Hat’s strategy and virtualisation roadmap outlined today, Red Hat is uniquely positioned to extend the reach of virtualisation with our complete virtualisation solutions portfolio, combining our core operating system strength, next-generation virtualisation technology and quality, scalable management tools,” said Paul Cormier, executive vice president and president, Products and Technologies at Red Hat.

“With this complete set of virtualisation solutions, Red Hat is breaking through barriers to lift the limitations placed on virtualisation and cloud computing for today’s enterprises,” he added.

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