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In the middle of the great discussions and conferences taking place at JBoss World, Orlando, Red Hat quietly leaked out the first cut of what is likely to influence the future of virtualization. Project oVirt. oVirt’s aim is to transform the host virtualization layer into a small stateless image which can be embedded on FLASH, or booted off a CD or PXE. No local disks needed. No installs. A physical server can become a virtual server just by booting oVirt.
oVirt also includes a new web management console which can manage any libvirt-based virtualization system. Whether that be one personal system, or the enterprise. It is no accident that oVirt is tightly integrating with the freeIPA project, so that administrators will be able to authenticate, authorize, and audit their virtual resources across the enterprise.
Not a bad week.
If you’re looking to get more information about what Red Hat can offer you in the virtualization space, we’ve been hosting a virtualization webinar series so that our customers, partners and anyone else that’s interested can hear about our capabilities straight from our product experts. The most recent webinars provided more information about high-availability infrastructures and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 database virtualization performance. We invite you to watch them to learn more.
Our webinar on December 12 was hosted by Andrew Cathrow, a Product Marketing Manager at Red Hat. It featured information on “Building a high-availability infrastructure with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle.” A focus was placed on the powerful new features incorporated into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, including server virtualization, storage virtualization, high availability, load balancing and clustering. Watch the webinar to learn about how you can drive costs our of business and deliver a scalable and highly available infrastructure using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
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A new breed of appliance is emerging. Not unlike their kitchen counterparts, the goal in using these appliances is to plug them in and use them, not to spend hours installing them, configuring them, tuning them and maintaining them.
These appliances are built using software.
You may already be heavily invested in the rapidly emerging technology of virtualization. If so, consider some of the ideas below for further exploiting the technology. If not, now is the right time to get started.
Virtualization provides a set of tools for increasing flexibility and lowering costs, things that are important in every enterprise and Information Technology organization. Virtualization solutions are becoming increasingly available and rich in features.
Since virtualization can provide significant benefits to your organization in multiple areas, you should be establishing pilots, developing expertise and putting virtualization technology to work now.
Today Red Hat made some announcements, under an umbrella theme of Linux Automation. At first glance, this would seem surprising. But when you tear it apart, a focus on automation makes extreme sense.
Go back 10 years and look what was happening in the processor space. Price/performance of Intel CPUs was challenging the legacy RISC systems. Microsoft was the largest benefactor of this, while the OEMs clung to their high margin UNIX/RISC systems. Who could blame them.
In 2001 Red Hat squarely focused on the commercial enterprise systems business. The enabler for this was no longer solely price/performance of x86 systems. But the recognition that technically, Linux had matured to the point to not just be an alternative to UNIX/RISC, but actually a market leader. Enterprise Linux was born, along with pioneering a subscription model that would keep us focusing on customer satisfaction and service rather than just the initial sale.
Today, millions of servers around the world are powered by Enterprise Linux. The heroes being the IT departments which made this choice, challenging the legacy before it was mainstream. What now is the obvious choice due to performance and cost.
The last 6 years have been focused on UNIX migration, allowing x86 performance to be realized, and building software subscription capabilities. In the next chapter we believe that Enterprise Linux will continue to take share against Windows solely based on performance, stability, and cost. However, basically due to impatience we wish to accelerate what has already become a behavioral norm for IT.
Linux Automation. The ability to run any application, on any system, at any time. Allowing IT to simplify their IT infrastructure in the process. With the belief that undue complexity and over-architecture will have both short and long term costs.
Any Application.
The RHEL application world, at 3000+ certification strong, is growing at the rate of approximately a new application every day. Application choice is critical for IT. The stability of the RHEL platform, and its release-to-release continuity allows application growth to continue without disruption.
Anywhere.
The move to x86 marked an inflection point for IT from the traditional use of large RISC servers. Today, the footprint which makes up the IT arsenal looks increasingly differentiated, allowing the right server to be matched with the right task. Rack-mount. Blades. 128-way SMP. Mainframes. PowerPC and Itanium. Virtualized servers based on VMWARE and RHEL 5. We want to enable IT choice, not dictate it. And deliver a consistent RHEL platform across each which drives IT simplicity, while allowing ISVs to reach all markets at low cost. Today we announce that the platform choice for RHEL has extended one further. Dedicated and virtual servers are now joined by a 3rd twin, with RHEL being available as an on-demand choice as part of Amazon EC2. With a supported ISV catalog 3000+ strong.
Anytime.
When the first version of Enterprise Linux was released in May of 2002, a physical system and its applications typically had a one to one affinity. The models of moving applications from one system to another was usually only realized at failover time, requiring costly hardware and hard labor to realize. Today the technology is in place to flip this. RHEL5 with integrated virtualization has built application mobility into the OS. Transparent to all applications on the platform. The resources apportioned to an application can be changed on demand. Applications can be live migrated to another system, ending the scheduling of planned outages. High availability delivered to all applications on the platform, at low cost.
To the 1000s of customers to whom Linux, OSS, and Red Hat has earned their trust, we thank you. The journey of the impact of open source software on your businesses has just begun.
Linux Automation. Any application. Anywhere. Anytime.
Not many people think of virtualization as a way to make applications run faster. In fact, the general assumption is that things are likely to be a little slower, hopefully not too much, but that the other advantages easily outweight the performance drop.
OK, so virtualization does cost some performance. But with the para-virtualization in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, we are seeing very small drops. Of course it’s application dependent, but single-digit percentage points seem to be the norm. Given the increased operational flexibility, for most this is absolutely a cost worth bearing. Bottom line: it makes sense to run any Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 system with paravirtualized guests.
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Just as we have worked closely together to provide best-in-class, end-to-end virtualization capabilities, Red Hat and Intel are excited to bring you the North American Value2 seminar tour. The tour consists of half-day interactive seminars where IT decision makers can learn how to transform their enterprise with an open source-based approach to virtualization and service-oriented architecture. Each seminar is led by Red Hat executives including Scott Crenshaw, VP, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Shaun Connolly, VP, Product Management, JBoss and features customers who have experienced success with Red Hat and JBoss solutions.
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Today we’re excited to announce the availability of new training and consulting services including the first Linux virtualization course of its kind to be offered. Our new training and services will pave a smooth path for our customers to gain cost savings and flexibility.
RH184 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Virtualization is a new two-day training course providing the domain expertise needed to install, configure and manage virtual hosts on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. It’s the first course dedicated to virtualization technology in the Linux training market and will prepare customers to maximize performance, cost savings and operational efficiency enabled by Red Hat Enterprise Linux integrated virtualization capabilities. If you’re a Red Hat certified professional or experienced Linux system administrator planning a move to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, this course is a perfect fit for you. Our new course joins Red Hat’s growing list of more than 30 different training courses and will be available to system administrators with a base Unix or Linux knowledge. Like all Red Hat training courses, it’s taught exclusively on live production systems. Prerequisites for the course include a Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) certification or equivalent knowledge.
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Over the past few years, a lot of IT hype has been expended on virtualization technology. It was ready for prime time, or it wasn’t; everybody was using it already, or they weren’t; it was expensive, or it wasn’t; and so on. Now that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has been available for a few months, we are starting to see how customers are actually going to use virtualization. This allows us to get to the truth behind the hype.
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Now that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has been available for a few months, it seems like a good time to stand back and take a higher-level look at the new member of the server family – Advanced Platform.
In previous releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we had AS and ES server variants. Have you noticed how nobody is mourning that we dropped them? Although they don’t exist with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, these variants were vital to establishing the Enterprise Linux product line. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the two variants was that they were technically identical. The same package set, same updates, same everything — except for a single file that contained the AS or ES name. Keeping them the same was very important because it meant that an ISV only needed to certify his application once, whereupon it was certified on both variants. » Read more