Red Hat lays out plans for virtualization

Details bid for a virtualized Linux environment, Xen integration.

Red Hat last week laid out its strategy to make it easier for customers to run and manage their workloads in a virtualized Linux environment.

Red Hat executives say they are working to provide a single, integrated Linux platform supporting virtualization. The company also announced an online resource center to help customers prepare for virtualized environments.

A preview of Red Hat's upcoming technologies, which includes the integration of open source Xen virtualization software, will be available this month in Red Hat's community-driven Fedora project, when the Fedora 5 core is released.

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Red Hat last week laid out its strategy to make it easier for customers to run and manage their workloads in a virtualized Linux environment.

Red Hat executives say they are working to provide a single, integrated Linux platform supporting virtualization. The company also announced an online resource center to help customers prepare for virtualized environments.

A preview of Red Hat's upcoming technologies, which includes the integration of open source Xen virtualization software, will be available this month in Red Hat's community-driven Fedora project, when the Fedora 5 core is released.

Red Hat expects to make those integrated virtualization technologies available this summer in a beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and at the same time deliver a set of migration, assessment and planning services for virtualized environments.

The general release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, which will include fully integrated virtualization capabilities, is expected by year-end.

"Rather than put out a path and create a specific virtualization stack, we're taking the virtualization capability and technology and integrating it into what you know as the enterprise Linux platform today," says Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens.

Virtualization is gaining wider adoption in data centers as IT managers look for ways to get more out of hardware resources, analysts say. The idea of separating software and services from underlying hardware has long been used on mainframes and high-end Unix systems, but companies, such as market leader VMware, are making virtualization possible on x86 systems.

Red Hat says virtualization is a key focus moving forward. Novell also is focusing on virtualization and plans native support for Xen virtualization technology in the next release of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server,slated for May.

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