Red Hat goes for virtualization

Red Hat is geared up to take a bigger slice of the virtualization pie. Its plan? To build virtual machine management right into the Linux operating system.

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Red Hat announced its plan to develop management features for the management of virtual server environments in the enterprise at the Red Hat Summit in Boston last week. Indeed, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is expected to eventually come with a hypervisor built into the kernel, as well as management tools to support the enterprise.

These management tools will allow thousands of virtual machines to be created and managed — without having to expand the ranks of Linux administrators.

In an interview with CEO Jim Whitehurst:

VMware’s the dominant player in an industry that’s what, like 5 or 10% penetrated? And it’s primarily in development and test scenarios, and primarily to reduce server sprawl…. We come from a different heritage. Our systems usually aren’t running at 10%. Linux workloads are a lot higher. The value from our perspective is less around server consolidation and more about what new functionality or architectures can be enabled by virtualization.

In addition, Red Hat also launched the beta for oVirt, a Linux-based hypervisor with a foot print of just 64MB. The hypervisor is based on KVM — or kernel-based virtual machine, and is able to host both Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems. More importantly, it supports important features such as live migration, which will allow applications running on virtual machines to be migrated — even if it is to another physical box, without any downtime.

Will enterprise-grade Linux virtualization benefit your organization?