Dr. Dobb's | Red Hat Beefing Up Virtualization Support in Enterprise Linux

Red Hat Beefing Up Virtualization Support in Enterprise Linux

Red Hat is adding management capabilities into Red Hat Enterprise Linux designed to put Xen on more of an equal footing with VMware, the commercial market leader in virtualization. The second beta of the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is due Tuesday.

November 20, 2006
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/red-hat-beefing-up-virtualization-suppor/195100006

Red Hat plans Tuesday to ship its second beta edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0, with Red Hat's first support for Xen open source virtualization.

Red Hat is adding management capabilities into Red Hat Linux designed to put Xen on more of an equal footing with VMware, the commercial market leader in virtualization.

Red Hat made its Anaconda installer software able to install virtual machines as well as regular software. And the Red Hat Network, which automatically sends out patches and upgrades to Red Hat customers, can now automatically update Linux in virtual machines as well as on physical servers, said Joel Berman, director of product management.

Red Hat's virtualization management capabilities will help Xen be more of a match for VMware's Infrastructure 3.0 management abilities. For example, Red Hat's Virtual Manager can move a running Xen virtual machine from one server to another without interruption to the user, a characteristic of VMware's VMotion, part of Infrastructure 3.

Red Hat's Virtual Manager can save a virtual machine to disk for shipment to a support center, where a technical glitch, which might otherwise difficult to duplicate, can be inspected. Virtual Manager can also take periodic snapshots of running virtual machines. If one fails after running one job for several hours, the restart doesn't have to go back to the beginning; it only needs to retrieve the latest snapshot and continue from there, said Nick Carr, director of product marketing.

If Red Hat customers don't want to upgrade all their applications to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0, they may continue running them in virtual machines under Red Hat 4.0 that have been activated on a 5.0 server.

"Virtual Manager will be an easy way to manage all of these options," said Berman.

Xen is an open source virtual machine hypervisor originally produced at the University of Cambridge, England. It makes use of hardware hooks built into the latest Intel and AMD chips to get the processor to perform tasks on behalf of several "guests" or virtual machines running above it instead of just one operating system. Xen's hypervisor approach is a more efficient form of virtualization than virtualization engines, such as Microsoft Virtual Server or VMware's early GSX Server, which sit on top of an operating system and sending messages to the hardware through it, said Berman.Red Hat 5.0 with Virtual Manager and support for Xen 3.0 will become generally available in the first quarter of 2007.

On another front, Red Hat is enlarging its push into enterprise middleware with the addition of an Enterprise Service Bus to its recently acquired JBoss application server middleware. The JBoss Enterprise Service Bus was introduced Nov. 20 at JBoss World in Berlin.

An ESB is considered a key building block of services-oriented architecture because it gets away from point-to-point messaging systems and implements general purpose routing between an application and many other pieces of software, such as other applications, middleware, databases or messaging systems.

The JBoss ESB 4.0 will become available in December and already has three years of production experience. Aviva Canada, Canada's second largest insurer, created the Rosetta ESB as it encountered integration problems rolling out Oracle Financials. Oracle's Fusion Middleware wasn't available at the time. Having generated an ESB, Aviva, a large JBoss Application Server user, donated it to JBoss, jump starting its service bus offering.

"The JBoss ESB is the result of a true community effort, from the technology donation to the individual developers who brought their expertise to the project," said Pierre Fricke, JBoss director of product management.

The JBoss ESB can leverage JBoss Rules, a rules engine that can set policies for routing content. It supports the IBM WebSphereMQ, Apache's ActiveMQ and JBossMQ messaging systems.