RHEV 3.0 beta publicly available

Red Hat announced the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 in August, and after testing and feedback has been received, an improved version was released for public evaluation.

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.

SUSE unveils OpenStack cloud solution, rips Red Hat

Earlier this month SUSE became the latest company to jump on the OpenStack bandwagon, announcing it would release an early development version of its SUSE Cloud.  That bandwagon is starting to get crowded now, with heavyweights like Dell and Canonical having already thrown their support behind the open source cloud computing project.

SUSE says their SUSE Cloud will be the first fully configured OpenStack-powered appliance. But, SUSE is being clear that the free download offered today is a development release, and not an enterprise ready solution.

“We didn’t just want to say this is what we want to do, we wanted to show our customers and our partners that we have been doing some work in this area and we’re serious about it. [This version] is a proof of concept demonstration to prove that the technologies are viable,” said Kerry Kim, the director of solutions marketing at SUSE, in an interview last week.

A final version of SUSE Cloud is expected sometime in the next nine to 12 months, Kim said.

“We’ve been looking at the cloud computing space for a while, and evaluating and exploring different alternatives and technologies. As we saw increased momentum around the OpenStack project, and the group opening up the project to a community-based approach, we felt the combination of momentum and openness was in line with our philosophy around leveraging the open source development community,” Kim added.

All the support around OpenStack obviously bodes well for the cloud computing project’s stability and longevity. However, there will be at least one notable holdout among prominent open source companies. Red Hat, which could become the first $1 billon open source company, has decided to head in its own direction, instead rolling out its own Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a service offering in CloudForms and OpenShift.

The company’s decision to turn away from OpenStack has caused some head scratching, and maybe a little animosity from some open source supporters, though Red Hat has said its own efforts are more “open” than OpenStack.

Kim didn’t go into detail about how SUSE Cloud would be technologically different from Red Hat’s products, but he didn’t miss his opportunity to tout OpenStack’s support within the open source community, and rail on the competition.

“Red Hat is actually an interesting example. They’ve chosen not to support OpenStack,” Kim said. “That’s sort of puzzling to us. Maybe they have their own stakeholder pressures and they have to make money. I have a biased view, but maybe as their share has increased they feel like they are now synonymous with open source, or something, and they can dictate what the open source community should be doing. I actually don’t think they’re getting a whole lot of support for their virtualization and cloud platform. I think the rest of the world is like, ‘I don’t know why those Red Hat cats want to do it all by themselves, other than maybe they want to make all the money for themselves.’ Our strategy is very different. We want to make money too, but we want to do it in concert with our partners.”

What do you think? Will companies like SUSE ride the OpenStack bandwagon to success, or will Red Hat be able to distinguish its brand with a unique cloud offering?

Red Hat acquires Gluster: The Red Hat of storage

Today, Red Hat announced the acquisition of Gluster, Inc., an open source storage solution provider specializing in the management of big data. Red Hat paid $136 million for the storage file system company, and hopes to bolster its presence in big data management and cloud data management with the purchase.

“The explosion of big data and the new paradigm of cloud computing are converging, forcing IT to re-think storage investments that are cost-effective, manageable and scale for the future,” said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president, Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat. “Our customers are looking for software-based storage solutions that manage their file-based data on-premise, in the cloud and bridging between the two. With unstructured data growth (such as log files, virtual machines, email, audio, video and documents), the 90’s paradigm of forcing everything into expensive, single-system DBMS residing on an internal corporate SAN has become unwieldy and impractical.”

Gluster’s founder, Anand Babu Periasamy spun off the company in 2005 from the supercomputer company California Supercomputer Corp. with the objective to build a better file system. Speaking to its open source roots, the name Gluster is a combination of GNU and cluster. The file system was created around the concept that having a centralized metadata server lowers performance and limits scalability and should instead use the underlying file system on arrays and not store data in proprietary formats.

Gluster provides a software-based, scale-out file system that layers above Red Hat’s other file systems. It is distributed across multiple systems and aggregates the total storage into a single namespace. A Gluster cluster exposes this namespace as an NFS or CIFS mount point that contains every file in the cluster. The underlying storage becomes fully virtualized, and can be distributed into private and public clouds. GlusterFS can also be deployed on Amazon’s EC2 or inside of KVM virtual machines.

“We believe this is a perfect combination of technologies, strategies and cultures and is a great development for our customers, employees, investors and community,” said Periasamy. “Gluster started off with a goal to be the Red Hat of storage. Now, we are the storage of Red Hat.”

With the company’s acquisition, Red Hat also gains the over 2,000 contributors to Gluster.org. The Gluster team recently announced that it is planning to provide highly scalable storage for unstructured data, while preserving the interoperability benefits of NAS.

“The scale out storage technology and expertise Red Hat is gaining from the acquisition of Gluster will serve as a powerful foundation for future public, private and hybrid storage clouds,” said Henry Baltazar, senior analyst of The 451 Group.

LinuxCon experts eye the future of Linux

VANCOUVER  B.C. — The Linux Foundation is celebrating the 20th birthday of Linux in style, with a black tie dinner event at the Commodore Ballroom, and state-of-the-art staging for the livestreamed keynote events at the third annual LinuxCon.

Throughout the week, conference attendees have been regaled with stories, celebrating the milestones of Linux, from its inception, initial adoption, and growing community support while looking forward to eventual world-domination — perhaps just not on the desktop.

On Wednesday, three Linux gurus joined the stage with Linux Foundation President, Jim Zemlin to reminisce and share their wisdom about Linux’s future path. Each shared their story of their first interaction with Linux, from compiling the OS from a CD in 1993 to a late introduction in 1998 at a forum on high-performance computing. The individual anecdotes were interesting and humorous, with a lot of audience laughter and the recollection of dissenting voices who had predicted that Linux wasn’t viable.

Continued »

RHEL 5.6 boasts new bug and security fixes

Though Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 may have just been released in November, RHEL 5 still has a lot left in the tank: Red Hat just announced version 5.6 of the platform with a host of new bug and security fixes.

Overall fixes in RHEL 5.6 number approximately 2,000, and there are 340 individual enhancements. Some of the security enhancements include updated Domain Name Service (DNS) packages – RHEL 5.6 improves the cryptographic signatures that are good for high-security installations such as in government organizations.

There is also now support for sVirt (SELinux virtualization), which allows Mandatory Access Control (MAC) profiles to be applied to virtual guests, enhancing the system’s security. In addition, ebtables, a Layer 2 firewall application, is introduced in RHEL 5.6. With this application, those using RHEL for large virtualized deployments can securely partition guest traffic with the application while configuring using multiple software bridges within RHEL.

Security enhancements aside, there is also a wealth of other improvements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6, including support for new processors and chipsets. RHEL 5 will continue to be updated until 2014 by Red Hat. For more on the update, check out SearchDataCenter.com’s news brief and Red Hat’s blog.

Red Hat to enhance PaaS cloud offering with Makara acquisition

On Tuesday, November 30, 2010, Red Hat announced they had acquired Makara, a developer of deployment and management solutions for Java and PHP applications in the cloud. Red Hat labeled the acquisition as an addition to Red Hat’s Cloud Foundations portfolio, which it released in June 2010.

Scott Crenshaw, Vice President and General Manager of Red Hat’s Cloud Business Unit explained that by combining JBoss Enterprise Middleware infrastructure with Makara’s Cloud Application Platform, Red Hat can offer a more comprehensive platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution that quickly moves applications to public and private clouds with minimal modifications.

“Unlike other PaaS vendors, Red Hat PaaS is open and doesn’t lock developers in,” said Crenshaw. “Developers can use the programming model of their their choice, from Ruby to Spring, to JEE and more. And they use the cloud of their choice, applications can be put on any cloud, from private to public from many different vendors… Makara’s technology will accelerate and enhance Red Hat Cloud Foundations PaaS.”

“Makara makes it easy to provision and secure cloud resources whether public or private on board new or existing JBoss or LAMP applications with versioning, rollback, and rolling restart capabilities built right in,” said Isaac Roth, CEO and co-founder of Makara.

According to Roth, with Makara developers can:

• Automatically scale applications up or down as the workload dictates.
• Monitor performance for the complete stack, including the network, Web, application and database tiers.
• And performing log management by aggregating persisting and making logs available for analysis regardless of the current size and state of the application run-time cluster.

Roth elaborated on the future of Makara on his blog: “We will continue to develop and offer Makara On-Demand for those choosing to deploy their applications to public clouds. We will also continue to evolve the Makara platform by adding more components to our supported software library.”

Crenshaw said that Red Hat will open up the Makara source code to the community going forward as well. To find out more about the open source shift for Makara, read Makara Cheif Technology Officer, Tobias Kunze Briseño’s blog post on the acqusition.

Red Hat plans to integrate Makara solutions into their PaaS offerings, but wouldn’t elaborate on when. Meanwhile, developers interested in testing out what Makara offers can register for a free trial to test drive the software.

Red Hat expands open source into the classroom

The release of RHEL 6 wasn’t the only big recent news to come out of the Red Hat camp – the open source leader announced that it’s bringing open source into the classroom.

Red Hat is working with professors around the world in incorporating open source into higher education computer science coursework and programs. Its sponsorship of POSSE (Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience) workshops is driving the initiative. The march to getting students educated in FOSS is especially urgent with the need for graduates with the right open source skills expected to rise over the coming years.

POSSE launched in July 2009 as a week-long workshop for professors interested in getting their students involved in the FOSS community as part of coursework. It has also been instrumental in getting disciplines outside of computer science exposed to open source. For instance, a POSSE workshop at Rochester Institute of Technology introduced FOSS to journalism professors. The expansion of gaining interest in FOSS through the program into formal open source collegiate coursework is only expected to further cement the need for open source as an educational tool to usher in the next generation of IT.

What do you think of Red Hat’s plans to bring open source into collegiate coursework? Is open source the future of computer science? What other projects should get involved? Sound off @LinuxTT on Twitter. You can also read the full Red Hat announcement right here.

Red Hat reports strong Q2 results

Just after market close yesterday, Red Hat announced its earnings for the second quarter of 2010, and results were profitable for the open source leader.

Total revenue for the quarter was $219.8 million, which was up 20% from the year ago quarter at $183.6 million, while subscription revenue for Q2 was up 19% to $186.2 from last year. Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst cited Red Hat’s cloud computing and virtualization efforts among the reasons for the solid growth for the company, including a private cloud management deal worth over $1 million. Whitehurst also looked at cross-selling of products, strong renewals and new project spending as reasons for the revenue increase.

You can check out the full earnings release with balance sheets and a full earnings report.

Huge page handling and CFS with tickless kernel highlights of RHEL 6 beta

Last week, Red Hat released the beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to the public, moving the next major release of their popular server operating system into the testing and hardening phase.

I spoke with Tim Burke, Vice President of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, and he filled me in on some of the details. Red Hat also has posted a blog with extensive product specs for RHEL 6 on their website.

Completely fair scheduler
A couple of weaknesses in Linux that were discussed with the Linux kernel panel at the recent Linux Collaboration Summit are addressed by RHEL 6. At the top of the list is the completely fair scheduler (CFS), with better “awareness” of the hardware topology, which Burke said is increasingly important in today’s systems.

“For systems like Intel’s Nehalem-EX, different pieces of memory are closely associated with different cores,” said Burke. “The cost of memory access is not uniform. [With CFS] I/O devices can be more efficiently accessed by the processor most local to it. It is better able to assign workloads to the optimal set of processors.”

This improved scheduler has been shared upstream, and is now part of the Linux development tree.

“We continue to perform work on improving latency in I/O stack,” said Burke. “We will drive that innovation upstream.”

Huge pages
Transparent huge pages are one of the virtualization improvements in RHEL 6 beta. The huge pages are a way of more efficiently mapping large regions of memory that can be used by applications, said Burke, who said that they have produced up to 20% performance enhancement in some systems.

“Virtual management registers page table entries and maps to a block of memory (4,096),” said Burke. “Memory that is mapping a virtualized guest could easily be 256 GB, so to manage that in 4,096 KB pages can be inefficient. But when you use huge pages, each page table can map up to 2 GB of physical memory.”

Huge pages themselves aren’t new, but in RHEL 5, the system administrator would have to reserve chunks of memory to use huge pages, said Burke.

“In RHEL 6 is ability to automatically manage huge pages, without the system admin having to reserve memory,” said Burke. “It automatically allocates large memory pages for any app that requests large memory allocation. It obviates having to alter application.”

To download the beta and begin testing it out, you can visit the RHEL 6 beta page on Red Hat’s website.

Collaboration Summit: Linux mature in 2010

Last week at the Hotel Kabuki in Japantown in San Francisco, Calif., Linux developers gathered for the Linux Collaboration Summit. The first day was a series of “keynotes” given by various parties interested and involved in areas of Linux, and days two and three consisted of focused workshops on subtopics within Linux.

Linux Foundation President Jim Zemlin, kicked off Wednesday’s keynotes with an optimistic view of Linux’s role in the current operating system market. He compared the competing demands of “free and open” with “fabulous” - specifically calling out Steve Jobs’ pitch of the iPad in a humorous clipped video that isolated the adjectives used to describe the new gadget. Zemlin said that Linux can be both free and fabulous, and because of that, will be well-suited to compete in this economy.

To summarize everything that occurred would take too long, but I’d like to highlight three keynote talks that were of particular interest to me.

IBM says get involved in Linux: early
Dan Frye, IBM’s Vice President of Open Systems Development, shared the 10+ years of IBM’s history and experience with Linux. He dished out advice to other companies that might be curious or worried about how they should or could contribute to Linux.

One piece of advice Frye gave was that the Linux developers from your company need to be from, or know how to work within the Linux community. Using contractors to do this work is not advised, said Frye, as the relationship with the Linux community over time is valuable to your company in terms of getting development projects through the process.

“You need to manage your open source developers, but you can’t manage their maintainers,” said Frye. “You have to understand open source and the communities the developers work in. The only thing that matters is the results. The thing you want is ‘influence.’ You can’t have control.”

As for those projects, it’s OK to scratch your own itch, says Frye. If you’re unsure about how to contribute to the kernel, get your developers to work on things that are of interest to your company.

“Initiate early – don’t spends months behind closed doors – approach the community,” said Frye. “If you’re going to make large contributions in an area, you can’t throw code and run.”

Frye also shared that Linux is now just as predictable to IBM as any other operating system, noting the maturity of the OS.

Open source = open cloud?
The cloud buzzword made it to the Collaboration Summit, with a blue-ribbon panel of clouderati including James Urquhart, product marketing manager for Cloud Computing and Virtualized Data Centers at Cisco, David Lutterkort, software engineer and Deltacloud Architect at Red Hat, Sam Ramji, vice president of Strategy at Sonoa and President of the CodePlex Foundation, and Doug Tidwell, IBM evangelist for Cloud Computing and SCA.

The panel examined the potential for cloud computing in the open source model. While open source is the technology behind a lot of cloud enablement (Linux is the operating system on servers running Amazon EC2 instances, etc.) because of the cost structure, having open source infrastructure beneath platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings may be impossible.

“The situation we’re in right now is that the market has to determine if having infrastructure openness is an important thing,” said Urquhart. Eucalyptus is the closest effort in this vein, but no major cloud providers are yet using Eucalyptus, keeping the open source community from tweaking the cloud systems to suit their needs.

The conversation further delved into data openness and the constraints placed on that by laws and regulations.

“I think in the next one to three years we’ll see a meaningful standard for data ownership,” said Ramji. “It will become accepted and normalized.”

As with any new technology, the panel discussion concluded without any real resolution, but there will be plenty more discussion on the respective panel members’ blogs and Twitter feeds if you want to keep up with it.

Your life may depend on Linux
Yes. Linux can be that serious.

In a real sign of the maturity of Linux, the head of the DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH (German Air Navigation Services) data center, Alexander Schanz, gave a presentation on how the agency is transitioning their entire data center from Unix to Linux. Still a work in progress (very methodical progress), the agency plans to port 1,500 systems from Unix to Linux. They are on their way to migrate primary systems to Linux, and all new ATC systems will be on Linux (both SUSE and Red Hat).

“With the appropriate skills and planning, Linux is stable enough to use in air traffic control,” said Schanz.

To deal with the learning curve of their administrators and operators, the agency has developed a special training program for their staff to learn Linux.

“Linux is not free,” said Schanz. “We have to employ people who know Linux, and they are not cheap.”

But still the agency is finding that it can save quite a bit of money with the platform that it makes all these investments worthwhile. I plan to follow up with Schanz and share more of the DFS story here in a future article. If you have any questions you would like me to ask Schanz, leave your comments here.

But all these great, inspiring, informative talks aside, the highlight of the event for many attendees may have been the best schwag giveaway ever: a new Nexus One phone (full disclosure: I didn’t take one). To get a visual of the event, some great photos were captured by Kenny Moy.