By now most virtualization.info readers should know that Red Hat plans to (finally) unveil its KVM-based virtualization offering on Sep. 1, at the Red Hat Summit 2009 in Chicago (and maybe at VMware VMworld 2009 as well).
The new product portfolio will include not one but two management solutions:
- Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers featuring Live Migration, High Availability, System Scheduler, Power Manager, Image manager, Snapshots, thin provisioning, monitoring and reporting.
- Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops (the connection broker and management console SolidICE acquired from Qumranet in September 2008)
While the public knows how SolidICE looks like, nobody really saw the first management solution above, except the few lucky beta testers that Red Hat secretly selected before June.
The only public management solution for virtual infrastructures that Red Hat is working on is called virt-Manager.
The product is promising (supports Xen, KVM and QEMU virtual machines) but it’s in the work since September 2006, it still is at version 0.80 (released at the end of July) and doesn’t seem enterprise-ready at all:
Redhat’s virtual machine manager has come a long way and is starting to show some real usability. I’ve gone from using command line exclusively to now only using command line for testing purposes. There’s still a lot to do but it’s still only version 0.8 and it’s developing at a nice pace. Apart from the bug with creating vms using existing storage, I’ve had no real usability problems with it. I am, however, looking forward to a nicer main viewer.
Hopefully virt-manager is not the product that Red Hat plans to use to compete against VMware vCenter, Citrix XenCenter and Essential, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Oracle/Virtual Iron management platforms.