In early September while most of the virtualization community was busy in San Francisco for the VMworld 2009, Red Hat was finally releasing the first piece of its new virtualization offering in Chicago at its Summit 2009.
The market expected the company to launch the new Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (RHEVH, a minimal version of RHEL plus KVM that could compete against VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V Server), and the new Enterprise Virtualization Managers (EVMs) for servers and desktops. But Red Hat only released RHEL 4.5.
In March the company announced that these new products would be released sequentially, starting mid 2009 and for next 18 months, but for now the general public knows nothing but a few technical details unofficially published by some a beta tester.
The ones that attended the Red Hat Summit in Chicago (or visited the Red Hat booth at VMworld) knows more. Luckily, Red Hat published some breakout sessions’ videos of the event, so we all can watch the ones related to virtualization:
video platform
video management
video solutions
free video player
video platform
video management
video solutions
free video player
video platform
video management
video solutions
free video player
Linux-KVM.com published an extensive synopsis of the first one above.
Here’s some points that are worth a highlight:
- Red Hat will support ISV software certified on RHEL whether it’s running on bare metal or running on the RHEL kvm or standalone kvm since it’s the same codebase.
- RHEV standalone kvm has a very small footprint of < 100mb in size which makes it easy to do things like pxe boot it.
- Hosts can scale host to 96 cores and 1TB RAM.
- Guests can scale up to 16vcpus and 256GB RAM.
- Supported Linux guests includes RHEL 3,4,5. Supported Windows drivers available for Windows XP, 2003 and 2008.
- NUMA, power management, memory page sharing (ksm) are some other important features. KSM important for density, very important and will be in product from day 1.
Light workload VMs on a 48 core machine: 256 GB RAM could run more than 600 VMs. - Testing results from internal and customers showed SAP workloads: 85-95% performance, Oracle OLTP: 80-92% bare metal. LAMP stack showed better than bare metal performance. Java achieved up to 94% bare metal.
- The management tools will be released in later half of 2009.
Supports high availability by allowing VMs to automatically restart on other host when host having problems. Supports system scheduler at cluster level, live migration and power saver mode. There’s a maintenance manager that will automatically live migrate vms off servers during scheduled maintenance. Also includes monitoring and reporting tools.
Support image management including templates and thin provisioningNote from virtualization.info: Red Hat published a video of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager on YouTube that we are featuring in the website sidebar and on virtualization.tv.