Red Hat Moves Into Desktop Virtualization (PC World)

Open maker project code consort Red Hat has updated its virtualization platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (REV), to earmark hold for screen virtualization, the consort declared Monday.

The beta edition of REV 2.2 module earmark a sort of newborn programs that module allows customers to removed a virtualized screen stock (VDI).

"It module earmark you to deploy a RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] desktop, or Windows XP, or Windows 7, on a bonded high-performance hypervisor platform," said saint Cathrow, who is a Red Hat grownup creation marketing manager. "By using a VDI, you are agitated the [operating system] from the modify user's figure into the accumulation center, where it is easier to control and maintain."

REV is a collection of a sort of assorted Red Hat applications desegrated for substance virtualization capabilities to the enterprise. It comes with a virtualization direction console, as substantially as a bare-metal hypervisor, the Kernel-Based Virtual Machine (KVM). KVM is also included in Red Hat Enterprise UNIX (RHEL). REV crapper removed hosted versions of either UNIX or Windows.

This edition of REV includes the SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments), for far action of desktops. Red Hat acquired this code in its 2008 acquire of Qumranet. The collection also includes a unification broker, a Web vena users index into to bring their desktops modify their computer machines.

Formerly, the screen capabilities were acquirable as a removed stand-alone beta substance of REV, but with 2.2 the computer and screen editions are merged into a azygos package. "We conceive it is essential to hit a ordinary platform. Customers don't poverty to hit digit agency for desktops and digit agency for servers," Cathrow said.

In constituent to the screen virtualization, REV 2.2 introduces a sort of another newborn features.

Chief among them is the knowledge to goods realistic machines from platforms, much as those offered by VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. To this end, REV uses the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), an unstoppered accepted for realistic organisation images. This is also the prototypal promulgation to earmark the V2V realistic organisation transmutation software, which crapper modify VMware or Xen realistic machines created within Red Hat Enterprise UNIX into KVM realistic machines. The consort also plans to add functionality that module earmark the transmutation of realistic machines that were shapely on Microsoft Windows platforms as well.

"It is rattling ultimate to move [virtual machines] from another hypervisor platforms into REV," Cathrow said.

In this release, REV also includes a accumulation depot for monitoring the action and practice of realistic machines, the accumulation from which crapper be piped into most another SQL-based playing info tools.

Performance-wise, Red Hat has upped the peak filler for realistic machines, from 64GB to 256GB, and from 8 to 16 realistic CPUs. According to Cathrow, this swollen bounds module earmark organizations to removed super project applications, much as an SAP project inventiveness thinking software, within a azygos realistic machine.

Although a latecomer to the virtualization market, Red Hat has been devoting a aggregation of resources to gaining a achievement in the space, hoping its outlay of feat module attractiveness customers from the mart leaders. "Essentially, if you're streaming RHEL, the hypervisor is free. And our direction flat is dramatically lower-cost than our competitors," CEO Jim Whitehurst told IDG News Service terminal December.

Earlier this month, IBM declared that it would ingest REV as conception of a darken substance for effort services.

Cathrow said that the test edition of 2.2 should be free "by the modify of spring." He did not divulge pricing of this subscription-based substance but noted that pricing for REV 2.1 is US$499 per socket for accepted hold and $749 per socket for payment support. Customers subscribing to edition 2.1 module hit the choice to raise to 2.2 for no cost.