RedHat announced its "Integrated Virtualization" strategy this morning at a press event in San Francisco. The goal of the effort is to to develop an environment to simplify virtualization deployment for RedHat customers and includes partners AMD, Intel, Network Appliance and Xensource. RedHat also launched a Virtualization Resource Center to support the efforts.
"Typically, server utilization has been less than 20% of available capacity" said Tim Yeaton, EVP, Enterprise Solutions for RedHat. "Virtualization represents three important business and IT aspects: cost savings-from hardware and software to power and cooling; agility-the ability to dynamically manage workloads; and reliability-the ability to migrate and isolate workloads."
For it's part, Intel has found that just because the technology is there doesn't mean it's viable. "A consolidated server workload behaves differently, so customers need an integrated environment" said Lorie Wigle, Director or Services Technology and Initiatives Marketing for Intel.
The integrated virtualization platform marks a "day in the evolution of the RHEL platform" according to RedHat CTO Brian Stevens. "Customers want to to treat virtualization as an architectural element and treat it as a commodity." Fedora Core 5, targeted for release next week will feature a preview of virtualization features and aims to "take the rocket science out of virtualization" said Stevens. "Customers have told us that they want to seamlessly integrate virtualization into their environments." This sentiment was echoed by Bruce Moxon, Senior Director, Strategic Technology, Network Appliance. "This asset stack adds to simplified operations and the ability to realize the vision of utility computing" said Moxon.
Frank Artale, VP Biz Dev at XenSource "the hypervisor is just one piece of the stack-only an OS vendor can test the entire stack. Having Xen in the RHEL stack is important for the quality of the code."
Pricing support for virtualization technology was not disclosed. RedHat suggested that virtualization will be part of the RHEL pricing and therefore are unlikely to price based on the instance, rather on the platform. RedHat's Stevens didn't commit to specific management tools but suggested that virtualization would work with other existing tool sets.
The virtualization market has thus far been dominated by VMware. RedHat's integration and adoption of the Xen hypervisor into RHEL will help to broaden, and in some cases actually create the market for virtualization in Linux operating systems.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on March 14, 2006 10:38 AM
