back to article Red Hat pumps out commercial KVM

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat is hosting its annual summit in Chicago this week, and the star of the event was today's launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, which sports the first commercially supported KVM hypervisor from the company. In this case, KVM is tucked up inside of RHEL 5.4, right alongside the integrated …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Horns

    perhaps now the sun also rises..... a little.....

    oracle's unbreakable linux relies on xen from redhat -> centos......

    now that redhat is backing out of xen and going for a mediocre full virtualization (instead of paravirtualized) -solution, maybe a couple of sunacle guys can now do sunacle's xen support/development they already did on solx86 ( and make it shippable.....;-) )

    with some un/breakable solaris x86 as the engine.......

    interesting times......

  2. Glen Turner 666

    KVM can be paravirtualised

    KVM is full virtualisation, but paravirtualised drivers for Linux's virtio subsystem (which KVM uses) are available for Windows clients (network, disk and graphics) and for Linux clients (everything).

    The real advantage of KVM is that it runs atop an operating system rather than atop a hypervisor. In the original IBM VM a hypervisor made sense, as the batch-processing MVS was not the sort of operating system you'd want to use to host a VM and so some new underlying operating system was needed. There was no point adding any feature to that operating system other than the ability to run a client VM. For modern operating systems there is no good reason to replace them with a hypervisor and running the clients atop a real operating system brings all the sophistication of an operating system along for no development effort.

    A secondary advantage is that KVM makes full use of the Linux's virtualisation features. These are product agnostic, and so makes for a safe long-run choice.

    For all of that, KVM is not quite ready for prime time deployment. It's now a lot more stable than in the past, but there's still a lot of polish which needs to be applied. I'd say within a year KVM will be the obvious choice when considering virtualisation under Linux. This will also be good for Linux desktop users, since there's no reason beyond marketing for KVM not to be available for them. Having a sandbox available is useful for quite a few desktop applications -- such as software testing and QA and training.

    Red Hat splitting its software offerings into VM and non-VM versions is more to do with revenue and marketing than with the technology.

  3. Simon Westerby 1
    Joke

    Technology TLA Crisis .. thats the real story

    I wondered when I first saw this why Redhat was making a "Keyboard, Video, Mouse" dongle, but realised as soon as started reading this that we've stimbled into an era when Three letters is simply no longer enough letters to effectively define what something is...

    We need to form a commitee to imediatly define future standards for acronyms to avoid this sort of public confusion in future !!

    Will FLA's be future proof enough (and is FLA a really valid name!!)

    Techonology as a whole is Doooooomed !!!

  4. The First Dave

    Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat

    Glad to see that you aren't calling them an Open-Source vendor any more!

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