Infrastructure
Red Hat targets VMware with open source virtualisation
The data centre revolution will be Linux
By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service | Published 13:11, 24 February 09
Red Hat has launched an entire line of virtualisation software aimed at attacking market leader VMware by giving customers an open-source option for virtualising their data centres.
The new line includes the built-in virtualisation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) OS as well as two virtual-machine management products - one for desktops and one for servers. Red Hat also is offering a stand-alone hypervisor called Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation.
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The new products also position Red Hat more solidly against Microsoft, which has a line of virtualisation-enablement and management technologies to accompany its popular Windows Server software.
Red Hat and Microsoft yesterday announced an agreement to support each other's virtualisation products.Red Hat purchased Israel-based virtualisation software vendor Qumranet last September and the new offerings are based on some of the technology from that deal. They also represent a migration from the Xen hypervisor, on which Red Hat based the virtualisation included in RHEL 5, to the KVM (kernel-based virtual machine) hypervisor. KVM is based on the Linux kernel and is designed for high performance and stability.
Red Hat will continue to support customers using the Xen virtualisation software through the lifecycle of the RHEL 5 OS, which is until at least 2014, the company said. The KVM hypervisor will first appear in RHEL 5.4, the next version of RHEL that is due for final release in the next few months. Red Hat released the current version of RHEL, RHEL 5.3, on January 20.
Red Hat's virtualisation line and news last week that Red Hat and competitor Microsoft will support customers running each other's virtualisation software mean the heat is on market leader VMware, which had a rocky 2008 with the sudden departure of President and CEO Diane Greene amid financial woes. She was replaced mid-year by former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz.
