After Red Hat, Novell too is working on KVM
When Red Hat announced its decision to switch virtualization technology, moving from Xen to KVM, in June 2008, it generated a lot of buzz.
It was a dangerous move, considering that the platform was pretty new, that its creator and maintainer was a young startup, Qumranet, and that no ISV was actually supporting its applications inside it.
On the other side KVM was integrated in the Linux kernel after just six months of development, and Red Hat eventually acquired Qumranet to get the knowledge, the people and the influence to return the most on its risky investment.
Nobody followed Red Hat: Citrix, Virtual Iron, Oracle, Sun and of course its primary competitor Novell continued to work on Xen.
Fast forward to late 2009: Red Hat is finally ready to unveil its commercial implementation of KVM, introducing Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4, Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (REVH) and Virtualization Manager for Servers (REVMS).
Red Hat continues to be the only virtualization player to offer a commercial implementation of KVM, but but things may change soon.
Novell is in fact researching a new hypervisor built on KVM called AlacrityVM:
AlacrityVM is a performance focused hypervisor based on the Linux KVM project. Virtualized environments often impose significant performance penalties against a given workload when compared to native “bare-metal” equivalents. This project is motivated by the belief that it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way, nor do we need exotic hardware to achieve it. AlacrityVM demonstrates that most of the existing performance bottlenecks in today’s system are simply the result of suboptimal software stacks. By systematically identifying and fixing the weak links in the guest/hypervisor equation, near native performance from a virtualized environment is realistically achievable.
We also aim to add new features, such as the ability to express real-time constraints, network qos, virtual filesystems, etc.
AlacrityVM is in a very early stage (the first public build appeared in March 2009) but it seems that Novell already submitted it to the Linux maintainers for inclusion in upcoming kernel 2.6.33.
Linus Torvalds rejected it saying that there was not enough interest around the project.
Part of the kernel or not, it demonstrates that Novell is considering and investing on Xen alternatives. And this is particularly interesting considering that the company announced its plan to release a lightweight version of their virtualization platform (read: with a stripped down version of SUSE Enterprise Linux) in March 2008 and never delivered so far.
virtualization.info Newest articles
May 22nd, 2012
Yesterday, during its annual conference in Las Vegas, EMC announced the acquisition of Syncplicity, a cloud-storage privately held startup founded in 2008 and based in Menlo Park, California.
Terms…
May 21st, 2012
On May 18th Oracle announced the general availability of version 3.1 of its x86 enterprise virtualization solution VM Server.
This release follows 3.0 announced on August 24th 2011.
All the new…
May 21st, 2012
In this post, published on May 18 in VROOM! Blog, the VMware’s Performance Team presented some of the most significant enhancements and optimizations brought to Teradici‘s PCoIP protocol in the…
May 17th, 2012
On May 15th NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA® VGX™ platform that will be available later this year through NVIDIA’s hardware OEM and VDI partners.
This new platform promises to deliver…
May 17th, 2012
Microsoft announced this week the new Beta version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) 7.0 Beta.
The Beta program opened on May 15th and the review…
May 15th, 2012
Today VMware announced VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, expected to be generally available in Q2 2012.
vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric…
May 15th, 2012
On April 4 Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO, has attended, as guest speaker, at a VMUG meeting in Italy.
One of the key point of the speech, documented in one hour-long…
May 14th, 2012
Last week Citrix announced a new tech preview for Hosted Server VDI technology that allows cloud providers to leverage Microsoft SPLA to host VDI-style desktops obtaining a pay-as-you-go monthly subscription licensing…
May 11th, 2012
On May 7 Atlantis Computing announced the general availability of its Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI 3.2, this product, tailored in particular for VMware View 5.1, enables virtual desktops deployment…
May 11th, 2012
On May 7 Citrix announced a technology preview of Project Aruba that extends Citrix VDI all-in-one proposal for the SMB market, VDI-in-a-Box, with personal vDisk technology.
VDI-in-a-Box, inherited from Kaviza…
May 10th, 2012
On May 7 Cloud Sidekick announced the Early Access Program release of Cato Enterprise Edition (EE) which extends the Community Edition (CE) with Storm Deployment Automation and support for…
May 9th, 2012
On April 26 VMware announced the general availability of VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) 1.1, previously introduced as a part of vCenter Operations Management Suite.
VIN automatically detects, discovers and…
May 8th, 2012
On May 3 VMware released a security update, that the company itself define as “accelerated“, with the purpose to patch five “critical” security issues across VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisor…
May 7th, 2012
On May 3 VMware announced it has joined the Facebook Open Compute Project, an initiative launched in 2011, with the objective of increase technology efficiencies and reduce the environmental impact…
Copyright © 2003-2012 virtualization.info. All rights reserved.
virtualization.info | cloudcomputing.info | virtualization.tv | Virtualization Congress