Earlier this month, I managed to attend a Red Hat webcast about their forthcoming virtualisation products. Although Red Hat Enterprise Linux has included the Xen hypervisor used by Citrix for a while now (as do other Linux distros), it seems that Red Hat wants to play in the enterprise virtualisation space with a new platform and management tools, directly competing with Citrix XenServer/Essentials, Microsoft Hyper-V/System Center Virtual Machine Manager and parts of the VMware portfolio.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation (RHEV) is scheduled for release in late 2009 and is currently in private beta. It’s a standalone hypervisor, based on a RHEL kernel with KVM, and is expected to be less than 100MB in size. Bootable from PXE, flash, local disk or SAN it will support up to 96 processing cores and 1TB of RAM, with VMs up to 16 vCPUs and 256GB of RAM. Red Hat is claiming that its high-performance virtual input/output drivers and PCI-pass through direct IO will allow RHEV to offer 98% of the performance of a physical (bare metal) solution. In addition, RHEV includes the dynamic memory page sharing technology that only Microsoft is unable to offer on it’s hypervisor right now; SELinux for isolation; live migration; snapshots; and thin provisioning.
To learn more and to read the entire article at its source, please refer to the following page, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation (aka “me too!”)- markwilson.it