Red Hat has formally announced its integrated virtualization initiative.
Red Hat intends to include Xen open source virtualization technology with its Linux operating system distribution, and to ensure all aspects of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform can cater for and exploit the virtualized environment.
In summer, Red Hat will make Virtualization Migration and Assessment Services available, along with an Enterprise Virtualization beta. Fully integrated virtualization is planned for Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5, scheduled for general availability by the end of 2006.
AMD and Intel are working closely with Red Hat in its development and test labs to make certain the chipsets are integrated with the initiative, ensuring that users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with virtualization will get software and hardware performance. Network Appliance’s collaboration will provide seamless integration with its storage solutions. The development relationship between Red Hat and XenSource will ensure the status of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as being best-in-class, including the enablement of XenSource management tools.
It is becoming crucial that the direct relationship between applications and infrastructure is decoupled. The benefits of virtualization capability are numerous and include the creation of a more flexible pool of IT resources better able to support consolidation and optimization strategies, along with improved workload management and much better utilization of hardware, especially servers.
Virtualization can be a solution for many common security problems. In those environments where security policies require that systems are separated by a firewall, they can now safely be located on the same physical server. In the development environment, each user can have a separate virtual server, insulating other coders from any problem software.
If virtualization is integrated with a system management solution, such as Red Hat Satellite Server, then during periods of peak use or maintenance, tasks can be migrated automatically to other resources. This allows multiple servers to be re-assigned work in seconds, according to the current workload or time of day.
This initiative is to be welcomed – if Linux enterprise distributions are to remain a serious alternative to other enterprise platforms, they must provide integrated and easy-to-deploy virtualization capability.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
