Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Strategy

Red Hat's recently updated virtualization strategy has resulted in an "oversubscribed" beta program. The world leader in open source solutions swings a big stick with its kernel-based virtualization products. Some believe one of the keys to successful large scale cloud initiatives is an open source hypervisor, and with Xen going commercial, turning to the open source veteran Red Hat seems a logical move. You may recall that Red Hat - using KVM - was the first to demonstrate live migration between AMD and Intel hosts.

"We are very pleased by the welcome we have received from enterprise companies all over the world who are looking to adopt virtualization pervasively and value the benefits of our open source solutions. Our Beta program is oversubscribed. We are excited to be in a position to deliver a flexible, comprehensive and cost-effective virtualization portfolio in which products will share a consistent hardware and software certification portfolio. We are in a unique position to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of virtualization solutions, ranging from a standalone hypervisor to a virtualized operating system to a comprehensive virtualization management product suite."

- Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat

Red Hat sees itself as an "agent of change" in the virtualization landscape and wants to deliver a cost effective "boxed" approach to virtualization and virtualization management. All of this is hinged on Red Hat's new KVM-based approach - enabled through their acquisition of Qumranet in September 2008 - which delivers the virtualization and management layers to Red Hat's Enterprise Linux and its kernel.

Along with Qumranet came Solid ICE and SPICE. Solid ICE is the VDI component running on KVM consisting of a virtual desktop server and controller front end. Solid ICE allows Red Hat to rapidly enter the VDI space without disrupting its Eco-System. Additionally, the SPICE protocol (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) enables an standardized connection protocol alternative to RDP with enhancements for the VDI user experience.

Red Hat's SPICE claims to offer the following features in the enterprise:

• Superior graphics performance (e.g. flash)


• video quality (30+ frames per second)


• bi-directional audio (for soft-phones/IP phones)


• bi-directional video (for video telephony/ video conferencing)


• No specialized hardware. Software only client that can be automatically installed via Active-X and a browser on the client machine

Red Hat's virtualization strategy reveals more of it's capabilities and depth in accompanying blogs and white papers. Adding to the vendor agnostic migration capabilities, Red Hat's KVM is slated to support VM hosts to 96 cores and 1TB of memory with guests scaling to 16 vCPUs and 64GB of memory. Additional features include high availabitily, live migration, global system scheduler, global power saving (through migration and power down), memory page sharing, thin storage provisioning and SELinux security.