Red Hat Launches oVirt Embedded KVM Hypervisor Project

Published: June 24, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

There's more than one way to make money from operating systems. Considering that hypervisors are really a kind of primitive operating system (or software-embodied hardware, if you want to hurt your head thinking about it too much) and that there is money to be made here, you can bet that most commercial operating system suppliers are trying to dice and slice their operating systems and hypervisors in as many ways as possible in an effort to address many different scenarios and thereby extract the most dough from the most IT shops.

At its eponymous customer and partner summit in Boston last week, commercial Linux distributor Red Hat announced that it is going to create a free-standing, open source, and presumably commercially support embedded hypervisor. Red Hat has, of course, supported the open source Xen hypervisor now controlled by Citrix Systems since the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 in March 2007. But increasingly, companies want to deploy an embedded variant of the hypervisor, which usually means a trimmed down hypervisor with hooks for various management tools that can be put on a flash device that either plugs into the system or is embedded in the system. An embedded hypervisor is one that is not inside of or atop of an operating system (even if it might have a baby Linux inside to do its initial boot), but is designed to be acquired and used to support operating systems.

While Citrix Systems and VMware offer embedded variants of their respective XenServer and ESX Server hypervisors, which are being supported by various platform makers, Red Hat is taking a slightly different route with its initial embedded hypervisor, opting to base its embedded Linux hypervisor on KVM, short for Kernel Virtual Machine. Vendors always like two alternatives, and Red Hat is no different when it comes to support of hypervisors. (Three is even better.) The KVM hypervisor was created by an Israeli company called Qumranet for its virtual desktop product, SolidICE. KVM is based on several open source technologies, and is itself an open source project, and the hypervisor creates virtual machine partitions on X86 and X64 servers and desktops that can run various Linuxes, Windows, and Unixes. Red Hat is not the first vendor to support KVM.

The Ubuntu variant of Debian Linux, created by British distro Canonical, supports VMware's ESX Server but has also opted to weave KVM support into its Linux distro. KVM has been part of the Linux kernel since 2006, but not every distro has announced support for it that is on par with support for the Xen hypervisor or VMware's ESX Server, which all distros pretty much have to support.

The Red Hat embedded hypervisor is called oVirt, and the project is based at ovirt.org. The KVM stack embodied in oVirt is fleshed out with libvirt, a tool that Red Hat has been using with Xen to manage virtual machine instances; libvirt is also used to manage storage related to virtual machine and to provide security for communication into and out of the virtual machines. oVirt also uses a program called collectd to collect statistics and monitor virtual machine images and has a Ruby on Rails development kit for application coding on virtual machines. The KVM stack implemented by Red Hat in oVirt also uses FreeIPA, which is not an alcohol-free beer but is a Kerberos/LDAP server for authentication and authorization of operating systems running on the virtual machines and for the hypervisor itself. This is an open source project, and Red Hat is asking developers to join up and help make the oVirt tools better.

oVirt is at the 0.91-1 beta release now, and you can download it here if you want to play around with it. The oVirt project is distributing its software under the GPU GPL v2 license, the same one that the Linux kernel currently uses. oVirt can and probably will support other hypervisors, with Xen being the most logical choice but also maybe Sun Microsystems' VirtualBox.

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