As we know IBM and Red Hat have a story of collaboration behind its back and they have been working lately together on various projects, the latest announcement they made together last December was about a new collaboration to deliver Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to IBM’s Power systems through Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Power.
Last year IBM declared its commitment to invest $1 billion in Linux and open source technologies for Power Systems, and it has accomplished with the next – generation Power Systems server integrating the POWER8 processor, designed for Big Data which allows to deliver the highest level of performance.
This announcement means that users can take advantage of IBM’s next-generation Power Systemes technology and the features of Red Hat Virtualization, which will enable enterprises to build a flexible infrastructure based on open source hardware and software solutions.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization includes Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager, an integrated control unit that allows users to manage hundreds of hosts and tens of thousands of virtual machines. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization implement the management of x86 and Power Systems. While the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization management server runs on an x86 architecture platform, it is now possible to manage clusters of Power architecture hosts, together with separate clusters of x86 architecture hosts all of that from a single pane of glass.
Additionally to the benefits of centralized management, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Power also permits:
- High Availability
- Live Migration and Storage Live Migration
- Intelligent Load Balancing
- Centralized Template Management
- Self-Service Portal for Quick Provisioning
Enterprises that are using IBM Linux on Power Systems are now allowed to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and users that are recently moving into open applications can take advantage of this solution to start using Power and POWER8 architecture. All software for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Power will be provided through Red Hat.
Always in December Red Hat also announced the release of the beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 which includes a version for Power processors running in little endian mode. Red Hat apparently is expecting a lot from 2015 and the expansion of the adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Power.