Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, which includes a standalone hypervisor and virtualization management software.
The server virtualization software is the latest addition to Red Hat's burgeoning Enterprise Virtualization portfolio, first announced in February. In September, Red Hat delivered the foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, which offers Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization technology. "KVM is unique in that it turns the Linux kernel itself into a hypervisor, leveraging the scalability, reliability, security, hardware enablement, and manageability that the world has come to expect with Linux-based solutions," says Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president of engineering for Red Hat. The general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, he adds, "marks yet another milestone in Red Hat's virtualization roadmap."
Red Hat's server virtualization offering includes Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor, a standalone, lightweight hypervisor designed to host Linux and Microsoft Windows virtual servers and desktops. It is designed to provide a virtualization foundation for cloud deployments and other highly dynamic IT environments. Using KVM technology, the hypervisor provides performance and security coupled with memory sharing technology, which permits more efficient guest consolidation, and enterprise features such as live migration.
The offering also includes management software, called Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers, intended to help users configure, provision, manage and organize virtualized Linux and Microsoft Windows servers.
With the additions of these latest offerings to the virtualization product family, "Red Hat has dramatically lowered the bar for IT to deploy and manage virtualized environments based on the RHEL platform," notes Stevens. "It is widely understood that the world's largest clouds are built on open source." As the enterprise evolves and makes use of both private and public cloud infrastructure, this software marks "a defining part of the solution stack offered by Red Hat for cloud build-out."
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops remains in private beta today and is expected to be made generally available in early 2010.
To learn more about the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio or to purchase Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, go here.