Red Hat debuts new hypervisor, open-sources Linux management platform

BOSTON -- Red Hat used its annual summit this week to improve the flexibility, openness and manageability of its Linux platforms, with announcements that it will deliver a new hypervisor and open source the code for the Red Hat Network Linux management platform.

Red Hat on Wednesday opened a beta for a Linux-based hypervisor called oVirt that can fit onto a 64MB flash drive and boot on virtually any piece of x86 hardware. The next day Red Hat announced the open sourcing of Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, an automated management tool for Linux that handles content updates, systems provisioning, updating and monitoring, permissions and scheduling on both physical and virtual servers.

The open sourcing of RHN, a project dubbed "Spacewalk," is a huge boon to the open source and Linux community, said Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation.

"There will [be lots of interest]," he said. "That's cool software. That's critical software. … It shows a real dedication to being an open source software company."

RHN Satellite is packaged software installed inside a customer's firewall. Red Hat also offers a version hosted over the Web, though the open sourcing applies solely to the Satellite model.

"We think it will develop more quickly [as open source], and we'll have an instant community of use," Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told the IDG News Service at the Red Hat Summit. "We'll find bugs we didn't know about and features will get added. We believe it's a superior model for developing software." (Read our Q&A with Whitehurst.)

In addition to individual developers, Linux distributors such as Oracle and Novell could conceivably take advantage of the RHN Satellite open sourcing, said Gartner analyst George Weiss.

The move to open source is also important for "strategic clarity," given that Red Hat is well known for its use of the open source model, Whitehurst said.

Zemlin was also excited about Red Hat's Linux-based hypervisor, which is based on KVM (kernel-based virtual machine) software rather than the open source Xen, the software that forms the basis of Red Hat's other virtualization products. KVM has been integrated with the Linux kernel since 2006.

"It's easier to support because it's already in the mainline Linux development process," Zemlin said. "They've seen a few technical advantages in KVM and probably some support advantages per the fact KVM is already in the [kernel]." 

Zemlin even said Red Hat's new hypervisor offers better security and manageability than market leader VMware. 

Not so fast, Weiss said. Integration in the Linux kernel's memory and CPU management means there's no need to "recreate that part of a kernel as a separate hypervisor," Weiss said. But when it comes to the "level of functional capability, it's still far behind VMware."

Red Hat emphasized that the Linux-based hypervisor can host both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems. That's no surprise, perhaps – Weiss noted that Microsoft's upcoming Hyper-V virtualization engine can support Linux guests.