Red Hat Fleshes Out Virtualization Plans with Fedora Core 5

Published: March 21, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in November 2005, commercial Linux distributor Red Hat announced that it would support the open source Xen virtual machine hypervisor in its future Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, due at the end of 2006. This week, with the Fedora Core 5 development release ready to be launched, Red Hat is being a little more specific about its plans for virtualization.

Last year, Red Hat promised to integrate Xen-based virtualization with Linux, with its storage virtualization software, which is called the Red Hat Global File System (GFS), and its Linux system management service, which is called the Red Hat Network. And because virtualized server pricing is a sticky issue, Red Hat also promised that its implementation of Xen would allow customers to run an unlimited number of virtual Linux instances for a flat subscription fee.

Like every other platform provider, Red Hat has had to reconcile itself to the fact that companies with moderately to quite complex IT infrastructure increasingly want to run virtualized machines in order to drive up server utilization and drive down management costs. While Red Hat--and indeed any server or operating system provider--would prefer for companies to just continue buying up servers and creating sprawl, since this makes them lots of money, those days are over.

So, like Novell before it, Red Hat is merging the Xen hypervisor into its Linux, and is hoping to drive another wave of Linux sales by offering not only an alternative to the very pricey virtualization on RISC/Unix boxes, but also to the commercial products available from VMware. (No, Red Hat and Novell will never say that in their press releases or publicly, but it is still true.)

To that end, Red Hat is putting the integrated Xen hypervisor into Fedora Core 5, which ships a few days late starting today. While Fedora Core 4 had Xen features in it, as did Novell's initial SUSE Linux 10.0 last year, the Xen hypervisor that is being woven into current openSUSE and Fedora development releases is more integrated into these Linuxes. Fedora Core 5 has a preview of the Xen technology that will be put into RHEL 5 by the end of the year. By summer, Red Hat says that it plans to offer virtualization migration and assessment services to customers as well as a beta program for RHEL 5 so customers can see how they might deploy the virtualization features and get a little experience with it. Red Hat has also set up a virtualization resource center, which you can see here.

The year-end date for RHEL 5 seems pretty solid, but because the Xen code base is shifting around so much and the Intel VT and AMD AVT hardware-assisted instruction set virtualization for their newest chips is also coming out this year, there are three things that are changing that Red Hat has to manage--it own code, Xen, and the underlying hardware. And that is a recipe for slippage. No matter who is trying to manage it.