RHEV 3.0 is based on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, which brings the performance seen in recent SPECvirt benchmarks and Linux kernel security features.  KVM benefits from the expanding presence of the Open Virtualization Alliance, a consortium established to foster the adoption of open virtualization alternatives, specifically KVM.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 includes the following updates:

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager is now a Java application running on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• A power user portal that provides end users with a self-service interface to provision virtual machines, define templates and administer their own environments
• A RESTful API that allows complete configuration and management of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for use by customers or a rich ecosystem of management partners
• Extended multi-level administrative capabilities, allowing fine-grained resource control, role based access control, delegation and hierarchical management
• New local storage capabilities
• An integrated and embedded reporting engine allowing for analysis of historic usage trends and utilization reports
• SPICE WAN optimization and enhanced performance including dynamic compression and automatic tuning of desktop effects and color depth. The new version of SPICE also features enhanced support for Linux desktops

An updated KVM hypervisor also features new capabilities. These include the ability to scale hosts and guests. RHEV 3.0 supports up to 160 cores and 2 TB of memory on a host system and up to 64 virtual CPUs per guest, and 512 GB of memory. Performance has also been improved in the latest KVM version, and the networking stack has been moved from userspace into the Linux kernel using vhost-net, improving performance and reducing latency. The transparent huge pages feature is also integrated, reducing the number of times memory is accessed, which improves performance for most workloads. A paravirtualized interrupt controller, x2paic, is used in the virtual machine, reducing guest overhead and improving performance in interrupt-heavy workloads. And Async-IO is used for block I/O operations. The use of SELinux-based sVirt infrastructure has strengthened the security capabilities of KVM as well.

 And it’s not just any Windows Server. To run the current RHEV management, users must get Windows Server 2008, R2. “You need the latest and greatest,” said an IT manager with a big Linux-oriented systems integration firm. No admins want to work with two sets of tools, said another attendee.

Face it, Linux shops have Linux skills and many want absolutely nothing to do with Windows. Full stop. They barely tolerate the sound of Windows boot-up music emanating from reporters’ laptops.

The odd Windows console requirement is a remnant of Red Hat’s acquisition of Qumranet, and its KVM virtualization expertise but it’s nearly over. The Windows-less RHEV 3.0 is due later this year.

Let us know what you think about the story; email Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

1: Red Hat is pitching itself hard as the “open” cloud player. It’s new CloudForms Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering promises to let users (buzzword alert) “leverage” existing technologies–virtual servers from Red Hat or VMware, public clouds by Amazon, IBM, and others; and on-premises or hosted physical servers.

Then there’s Red Hat OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) which, Red Hat said, will support Java, Python,  PHP and Ruby languages and Spring, Seam, Weld, CDI, Rails, Zend, Django, Java EE and other frameworks.

Isaac Roth, Red Hat’s PaaS Master, said developers just want to develop. Figuring out infrastructure, platform basics, servers, and fundamentals is not how developers should be spending their time. 

“God it’s awful,” Roth told reporters on Wednesday. “I just want to write Angry Birds.”  His claim is that OpenShift Express will ease their pain.

OpenShift Express, a free set of client development tools, is available now. Two other, higher-end versions, OpenShift Flex and OpenShift Power add more capabilities.

2: Last year, Summit attendees were busy weighing Red Hat’s Xen-for-KVM virtualization switch and what issues they might experience in a Xen-to-KVM migration of their own. Flash forward to this year, Red Hat appears to embrace the idea of multiple hypervisors. It must be that whole “openness” thing. VMware doesn’t share that philosophy, according to Red Hat exec VP Paul Cormier who charged that VMware  ”is trying to take the entire world back to the 1980s by locking you into the hardware level with ESX.”

3: Perhaps Red Hat is getting all kumbaya about virtualization because it has no choice. Judging from another Summit session, there’s a heckuva a lot RHEL shops running (gasp!) VMware. Even RHEL shops that would love to go with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) aren’t gonna go there until they no longer have to run RHEV management on a Windows (yes, Windows!) server. That hated Windows requirement will finally go away with the upcoming RHEV 3 release.

4: Judging from the packed session on running high-availability Oracle databases on RHEL, Oracle’s efforts to supplant RHEL with Oracle Unbreakable Linux are falling woefully short.

5: Opinions on Red Hat support remain mixed. Some RHEL customers  privately say companies deploy RHEL because they have to prove they’re running a supported OS. But the problem is, when they actually call for support, the results are wildly inconsistent. Two Summit attendees — who work for different government agencies — said they are very happy with RHEL support, although they both also noted that they never, ever use it. Many techie-heavy Linux shops may be in the same boat. (If a support call is never dialed, does support really happen?)

Here’s more cloud news from Red Hat Summit/JBoss World.

Let us know what you think about the story; email Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

1) Control groups (cgroups): Cgroups was initially developed to limit resource usage in the Linux kernel. Memory, bandwidth, CPU usage can be controlled using cgroups, and it can be used to deny access to and monitor system resources. Red Hat’s Resource Management Guide has a great description with a lot of detail on how they work, check it out for more info. The developers are still working on improving how cgroups work, so report bugs and stay tuned!

2) KVM: It’s really the hypervisor that will be most supported by developers… so get ready to switch from Xen if you haven’t already. Christoph Hellwig gave a thorough talk on how KVM and qemu handle presenting local storage to the guest and what developers are doing in that area. Mike Day of IBM set out to debunk some myths about KVM that have held it up from being adopted more broadly. Some of his points were well-received by the audience, but there was a little dissension in the audience when he tried to claim that KVM and VMware were very similar because VMware’s VMKernel is largely based on the same Linux code… Audience members (who work at VMware) said no it’s not. It hasn’t been for a while.

3) Yocto Project: While you may not care much about embedded devices, who knows how the world (or your job) might change in the future? Besides, Linux is in everything if it’s electronic. The Yocto Project is the combined effort of all the major embedded chip vendors, embedded commercial Linux vendors, individual developers and OpenEmbedded to help developers not have to reinvent the wheel each time they go to create a new device. Check it out.

4) File systems: A great talk from Michael Rubin of Google provided details on why Google chose ext4 to deploy to replace ext2 (and a little about their process of doing it slowly so they didn’t lose all the data). XFS and ext3 were considered but dismissed, the former due to its complexity, the latter because it contained some of the same drawbacks as ext2. While Google chose ext4, Rubin seemed to have caught the buzz around btrfs, which just wasn’t “mature” at the time. With a three year transition from ext2 to ext4 though, I’m doubting Google will be looking to make another move any time soon. But if you’re looking at a file system upgrade, it may be worth looking into “butter.”

5) Open vSwitch: Open vSwitch is a network switch built for virtual environments and differs from traditional switches by exporting an external interface for fine-grained control of configuration state and forwarding behavior. There was a well-attended presentation on this technology and it’s certainly something to watch or look into if you are running large virtual environments and need more efficiency.

My very unscientific sampling of conference-goers turned up a mix of reasons that motivated people to attend the recent Red Hat Summit, which equaled or exceeded last year’s event, despite the economic downturn and competition from VMware.

But learning seemed to be the prime motivator. For one thing, the assistant of a workshop presenter observed that the company’s technical workshop was more crowded than the general one, which dovetailed with my experience at other sessions. So I’m guessing that attendees, as a whole, were after highly detailed information to help them do their jobs rather than more topical overviews.

And I’ve just got a hunch that KVM and the coming Red Hat Virtualization platform were a big draw. But you could learn something about this remotely, via Webcasts, news articles, or other outlets. So the real advantage to being there is the additional networking factor.

Two attendees whose primary purpose was networking included Steve Giovannetti, CTO of Hub City Media, and Michael Howard of the U.S. Navy’s Spaware System Center in Charleston, S.C. As a new Red Hat/JBoss Catalyst partner, Hub City Media’s main goal in attending (in addition to being an exhibitor) was “getting to know folks and connecting with customers,” Giovannetti said.

Giovannetti said Red Hat’s vision is “great,” and praised its decision to switch to the KVM hypervisor. Although KVM “has a long way to go,” it’s good that Red Hat will support both KVM and Xen in the interim. “Getting all the virtualization vendors to cooperative will be a challenge… but, ultimately, customers will demand portability,” he said.

Howard, one of three government IT staffers I met at the Summit (a remarkable percentage), also viewed the conference as a networking opportunity. Howard’s main task with the Navy the past four years has been to promote the use of open source in the government and offer user feedback to vendors like Red Hat.

“If I give the open source community our feedback, the taxpayers save millions and the government gets software development for free,” he said.

A Red Hat Enterprise Linux customer, the Navy also is using Red Hat’s JBoss Java application platform and is keenly interested in ensuring that JBoss continues in a strong direction, Howard said.

“JBoss has been great,” he said. “Three of the best JBoss developers in the world work for us.”

David Pullman, a systems administrator for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said he wants to learn more about KVM because NIST is getting ready to expand its use of virtualization. NIST currently has a small virtualization project with Xen and uses a third-party vendor for high availability and live migration. KVM and Red Hat’s SPICE virtualized desktop both sound interesting, he said.

The lone prize-winner I met at the conference was Rick Gideon, chief operating officer of ecommerce.com. Gideon came to the Summit because his company won the JBoss Innovation award for outstanding architecture.

Based in Columbus, Ohio, Gideon’s firm hosts 500,000 websites and collaborated with EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, Zimbra and others to build an intelligent platform for websites that can be provisioned automatically and dynamically, shifting services as needed based on business rules, he said. The platform runs on Red Hat and JBoss.

“We’re looking to begin partnerships, “ Gideon said. “We’ll be building and deploying [the new system] this year.”

The company’s virtualization products (launching in the next three to 18 months) include:

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor
• RHEL 5.4
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform

The biggest change is a shift to using the kernel virtual machine (KVM) hypervisor, and shifting away from Citrix’s XenServer. This move is the next logical step, following Red Hat’s acquisition of Qumranet in September 2008. Qumranet came with virtualization solutions, including its KVM platform and SolidICE offering, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

In the company’s webcast, the question was asked “Why does the industry need another hypervisor?” Despite the fact that is amused some in the IT world, Thadani coolly stated that while Xen was the best hypervisor on the market in 2007 when RHEL 5 was released, “the KVM hypervisor has demonstrated that it offers superior capabilities… so it will be the strategic direction for the future development of our virtualization product portfolio.” He also explained that Red Hat will continue to support Xen until 2014.

Thandani said that by choosing KVM, performance woes would be resolved, citing up to 98% bare-metal performance. He highlighted that KVM, as part of the Linux kernel, takes advantage of the development work that has gone into Linux, including the hardening effort. Additionally, Red Hat and other developers have worked with the government on SELinux, a built-in Linux security component missing from other hypervisors in the marketplace.

Current virtual machine (VM) deployments max out in the 1,000s of machines, and thus they are unable to meet current business needs for more complex operations. Thadani shared that Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers is designed for large-scale systems management, and is capable of scaling to thousands of hosts with Red Hat’s new search-driven user interface, which allows administrators to easily manage a large number of machines, scaling up to the tens of thousands of VMs. High-performance virtualized machines is the area that Red Hat is positioning itself to lead in, according to Thadani.

The stand-alone Red Hat Virtualization Manager for Servers is designed to be implemented with shops less familiar with enterprise Linux. According to the company, it is:

A new, richly featured virtualization management solution for servers that will be the first open source product in the industry to allow fully integrated management across virtual servers and virtual desktops, featuring Live Migration, High Availability, System Scheduler, Power Manager, Image manager, Snapshots, thin provisioning, monitoring, and reporting.

Thadani explained the difference between the stand-alone and integrated virtualization management offerings, equating them to the difference between a point-and-shoot camera and a SLR camera.

“From the stand-alone standpoint, we’ve designed it to be easy-to-use and easy to deploy,” says Thadani. “It is for enterprises without a lot of Linux experience, and we’ve made it easy to use. It’s a new market for Red Hat.”

To sum it all up, Red Hat is harnessing the power and current buzz in caused by virtualization technology and taking advantage of the current economic climate to move into new markets. No pricing has yet been released for the products, but it’s open source.

Here are summaries of his predictions:

1. As the economy worsens, adoption of open source software will increase .
2. Open source adoption will accelerate across the full infrastructure software stack and into applications.
3. SaaS and cloud computing solutions will grow and pull open source with it.
4. Mergers and acquisitions of open source vendors will continue.
5. Competition from open source will drive proprietary software vendors to take the first steps in changing their business models.
6. Open source stacks will emerge from strong market partnerships.
7. Systems integrators will guarantee first-year cost savings for migrations to open source.

For the most part, I’m with him. As budgets tighten, it only makes sense that “free” will flourish. We hear that consumers are only looking for sales these days, so why wouldn’t companies? With this increase generally, and as more acceptance and trust of open source occurs, it seems natural that it will extend through the stack and through more applications (e.g., Vyatta has been busy releasing three open source networking appliances in 2008). And perhaps the upside of a down job market is that some programmers, with free time on their hands, can finish projects they had on the back burner. In 2008, we heard a lot of buzz about the cloud, and this cost-conscious computing model pairs well with open source. If you buy the cloud hype, you can easily see the increased opportunity for open source adoption that it provides.

We know that open source gained ground in the enterprise, and we even saw major proprietary software vendors change their tune (if not their business models) — ceding some ground to open source devotees.

What are your predictions for open source? Share them below or make your case against Burkhardt’s divinations.

The Belmont, Calif., company, which describes its customers as smarter and better looking than those of its giant competitor in its press releases, debuted its 2501 appliance last week at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. The 2501 has nearly twice the horsepower (1.8 GHz versus 1 GHz) and more expansion slots than its 514 predecessor, which was introduced last March.

Although Cisco has overwhelming market share, Vyatta’s pitch is its eye-popping price advantage (it’s about a tenth of Cisco’s cost). In addition, the functionality of Vyatta’s router is in software, which is easy to upgrade, versus Cisco’s proprietary hardware boxes, which can only be upgraded via replacement.

Rob Whiteley, the principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said the new router is better and more powerful than its predecessor and would enable Vyatta to go after more than the low-hanging fruit of small companies and branch offices.

The 2501, in contrast, has the additional processing power and throughput required for medium to large networks and could function as a link to a wide area network (WAN) or a security appliance.

Vyatta will never be large enough to meet all of most companies’ needs, Whiteley said. But the growing acceptance of open source products and the current budget-shrinking economy should help Vyatta’s cause, he said. Ultimately, Vyatta’s success will depend on its ability to offer additional services along with its routers, he said.

Currently in beta, oVirt comprises two components: oVirt Managed Node, which is an embedded hypervisor based on a Linux kernel and KVM; and oVirt Server Suite, an administrative console that includes a Web interface and has functionality for tasks related to virtual machine management, such as status monitoring, performance monitoring and visualization and authentication.

With oVirt, IT administrators get a picture of “what’s going on in your server room from a virtualization perspective,” said Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens. The current generation of virtualization management tools, contends Stevens, fall short for customers because they are proprietary and do not integrate into the enterprise.

The oVirt infrastructure integrates with several open source projects, including libvirt for virtual machine management, FreeIPA for directory services, Cobbler and Koan for provisioning, and collectd for performance data collection.

Currently oVirt enables IT administrations to collect data from managed hosts; eventually Stevens said that oVirt will include automation capabilities to allow IT administrators to establish service-level agreements around physical and virtual machines and migrate machines accordingly based on those levels.

As the VAR Guy noted in a recent blog post on the upcoming Red Hat Summit, Red Hat has some gumption. The Raleigh, N.C.-based company has crossed the Mason-Dixon line to hold its annual event in Boston, the territory of its rival, Waltham, Mass-based Novell: What chutzpah!

Not to be outshined, Novell has made its presence known, posting some conspicuous advertising in the Hynes Convention Center, the location for this year’s Red Hat Summit, the VAR Guy reported.

But whether Red Hat’s choice of venue is a real shot across the bow or not, there’s little doubt that that over the past several years, the Red Hat/Novell rivalry has gotten pretty heated. One could date the boiling tensions to 2006, when Novell signed an agreement with Microsoft to share product patents. In 2007, the two companies agreed to work toward interoperability and have even dedicated a lab to that purpose.

By joining forces, Microsoft and Novell aim to gain an even stronger foothold in the open source market, though some data indicates that both the Red Hat and Ubuntu distributions have made strides against Novell SUSE. A new survey on open source adoption may support these findings.

The VAR Guy also noted Cisco’s expected prominence at the Summit and wondered whether it might signal an upcoming Cisco/Red Hat partnership, much like Microsoft’s with Novell. Or maybe Cisco’s “cozying up,” as the VAR Guy characterized it, is more a case of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Consider this user comment in response to the Var Guy’s musings:

“Cisco now views Microsoft as its #1 threat in unified communications and other areas,” the user wrote. “I think they are just solidly placing themselves on the other side to be honest. They see a cost/competitive advantage and want to help set the ‘other’ standard.”

Stay tuned from the frontlines for more Red Hat Summit coverage.