Open source and virtualization moves highlight annual Red Hat Summit
Red Hat released a new server virtualization platform and open sourced the code of Red Hat Network.
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.
Red Hat has a little bit of a juggling act in offering both Xen and KVM-based hypervisors. “To some extent we’re trying to be a bit more hypervisor-agnostic,” Whitehurst said in an interview with Network World.
Virtualization is a key part of Red Hat’s cloud computing strategy, and the ability to run applications on many types of platforms, Whitehurst said. The vendor already offers Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) through the Amazon EC2 cloud computing service, giving developers an easy way to write an application on Red Hat and deploy it over the Web, Zemlin said.
“The value from our perspective is less around server consolidation and more about what new functionality or architectures can be enabled by virtualization,” Whitehurst said. “The most fundamental example of this is our use of virtualization in RHEL to create application mobility. We call it Linux automation, any application anywhere anytime. If an application is certified on RHEL, it’s certified bare metal, it’s certified on RHEL running on a hypervisor, it’s certified on Amazon EC2 cloud, or any cloud. You’ve just completely freed the application to run wherever.”
Red Hat said the new Linux-based hypervisor supports key features such as live migration, which lets users move an application running on a virtual server from one physical device to another without any downtime.
The virtualization news and the open sourcing of RHN Satellite complement each other well, Weiss said, because “the Satellite network becomes a network distribution vehicle for virtual machines … as well as other applications and packages that could be management-oriented.”
Observers at the Red Hat Summit seem to be impressed by the vendor’s overall business strategy. Goldman Sachs issued a research note calling Red Hat the “picture of stability.”
Massive growth of Linux, the integration of JBoss middleware and leadership in cloud computing all serve the company well, Zemlin added.
When asked if he has any criticisms of Red Hat, Zemlin was hard-pressed to think of any, other than a sense that Red Hat might want to consider targeting the Windows-dominated market for consumer desktops. Frustration with Windows Vista could give Red Hat or another Linux company a lucrative opening in the low end of the PC market, he said.
“The Linux industry needs Red Hat to be successful,” Zemlin said. “They are a poster child for success in Linux and open source.”
