Red Hat's commercial implementation of its open-source KVM hypervisor, Enterprise virtualisation 2.1 (RHEV) was released in November 2009. However, changes in server hardware and end users' desire to run fatter virtual machines has pushed Red Hat to make another release. The beta testing program for Red Hat Enterprise virtualisation (RHEV) 2.2 opened up recently.
With this release Red Hat is doubling up the number of virtual CPUs that a virtual machine can employ to 16 and is quadrupling the main memory that can be addressed by a VM to 256GB. RHEV 2.2 can support up to 256 GB of memory for a virtual machine, which is a four-fold increase over the 64 GB that RHEV supported in November. Additionally with the RHEV 2.2 beta, Red Hat is expanding the platform to support both desktop and server virtualisation management.
"The plan will be for a single platform with one installer for Red Hat Enterprise virtualisation," said Andy Cathrow, senior product marketing manager for Red Hat's virtualisation solutions. "It is based on a subscription you buy, and you'll be entitled to use the functionality for desktop, servers or both."
Red Hat had been talking about its new virtualisation strategy for most of 2009. The Linux vendor finally made good on that talk with the release of Red Hat Enterprise virtualisation for Servers, which includes a standalone hypervisor (RHEF-H) as well as a management platform (RHEV-M).
As early as February 2009, the company had outlined its plan for a suite of virtualisation products based on Kernel-based Virtual Machine, the favored virtualisation solution of the upstream kernel community.
Previously Red Hat had focused its virtualisation efforts around the Xen hypervisor. Owing to Xen's buy-out by Citrix in late 2007 and the latter's close relationship with Microsoft Red Hat started looking at KVM. KVM is an open source framework that brings native full virtualisation to the Linux kernel. It is designed for the x86 architecture and takes advantage of processor virtualisation extensions. It has been part of the mainline Linux kernel since 2.6.20. In September 2008 Red Hat boosted its virtualisation strategy by acquiring Qumranet, a leading commercial vendor behind KVM, for USD 107 million.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (RHEL) release, which came out in September 2009, marked the company's first deliverable from its new KVM-based virtualisation roadmap. "RHEL 5.4 with built-in virtualisation is a platform for our existing customer base that has experience with Red Hat [and] want a flexible platform where they can use their existing tools," explained the senior director of Red Hat's virtualisation business, Navin Thadani, during the release. "For customers that are newer to Red Hat and are looking for an easy-to-use, out-of-the-box solution, we believe they will use the Red Hat Enterprise virtualisation Hypervisor (RHEV-H)."
Red Hat RHEV Gains Support from IBM, Voddler, Symbian and NTT
Though RHEV as a platform was officially rolled out only a few months ago, Red Hat has already experienced some success with the platform. IBM has started adopting the technology as part of its new cloud service. Red Hat executives did not disclose financial specifics of the deal, though they did describe the win as a major one.
"IBM could have chosen anything -- they could have gone with VMware, Microsoft's Hyper-V or something from kernel.org, but instead they chose Red Hat Enterprise virtualisation (RHEV)," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of Red Hat's cloud business. "We think the evidence is clear that KVM is the virtualisation technology of the future and that RHEV is our way of delivering that with an enterprise-class product."
On March 15, the Symbian Foundation announced it was building a cloud on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The foundation has been using the operating system for its developer site and wanted an open source base (including KVM) for hosting development with Symbian as the leading mobile platform went open source.
In early March 2010 a leading Swedish Internet company, Voddler, adopted Red Hat Enterprise virtualisation as its standard environment. Voddler distributes movies online, and needs to frequently reallocate resources to match demand. It has the ability to perform live migration of KVM virtual machines and execute dynamic resource scheduling through the Red Hat management layer.
RHEV 2.2 Highlights
Virtual machine conversion: RHEV 2.2 will leverage the work Red Hat's engineers have done on the libguestfs open source project to make a virtual-to-virtual (V2V) migration tool. Libguestfs allows for a virtual machine image to be taken offline, opened up, and edited by system administrators - perhaps they change registry settings on operating systems running in the VMs or tweaking the file systems. With V2V, a VMware or Xen image is converted into OVF, which can then be used with RHEV 2.2.
"I think that libguestfs is a really interesting piece of a solution. It is a library for accessing and manipulating virtual machine images," Cathrow said. "With this library, you can open a virtual machine image and make offline changes to it -- everything from complex structural changes like filesystems and partition manipulation, even down to file, RPM and windows registry changes."
Virtual desktop support: Red Hat Enterprise virtualisation 2.2 is designed to support both virtual server and virtual desktop environments from the same management platform.
Data warehouse: Red Hat Enterprise virtualisation Manager now includes a data warehouse that collects monitoring data for hosts, virtual machines and storage, allowing customers to analyze their environment and create reports using any query tool that supports SQL.
Windows dependency: one thing that has not changed in RHEV 2.2 is the need for RHEV-M management server to run on a Windows Servers. "The Windows dependency will be removed in the Red Hat Enterprise virtualisation 3.0 release," Cathrow said. "In the meantime, we have ported our backend code to Java and we are working now on a pure HTML frontend that can be accessed with a Windows or Linux system."
RedHat is an active partner with Cisco in the virtualisation triple alliance. Cisco, EMC and VMware are partners in the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition that was formed in November 2009 to integrate services, hardware and support for virtualisation solutions. While Red Hat has been vocal about the fact that they do not see either of these industry leading vendors as a direct competitor and say that the alliance is a step forward for the industry as a whole.