Stories about: KVM

Even before Red Hat bought the virtualization company Qumranet, with its Linux KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) platform, Red Hat had made it clear that it was moving into virtualization in a big way. At its annual Red Hat Summit in June, the Linux powerhouse announced that it would be deploying its Embedded Linux Hypervisor, oVirt, which is based on KVM in its server line. This lightweight, embeddable hypervisor currently enables users to run run Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows VMs on Linux.

Linux vendor Red Hat Thursday jumped deeper into the virtualization marketplace by announcing its acquisition of Qumranet, which offers an embedded KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) platform that will allow Red Hat to vastly expand its capabilities for customers.

We spoke to Clyde Williams, Infrastructure Systems Manager for Southeast Alabama Medical Center; Walt Cornelison, Director of Information Technology for Tropitone Furniture - a manufacturer or high-end outdoor furniture; Jason Ford, CTO of BlackMesh Hosting and Solution - a managed hosting and managed services firm; Keith Parnell, CIO of Stratum Marketing - a marketing communications agency. Here's how our conversation went:

Windows Vista debuted to muffled applause, followed by lackluster sales. Up until June 30, cash-strapped businesses looking to avoid the cost of upgrading to new Vista-compatible hardware could still purchase trusty Windows XP. Now, however, Windows XP is available only as a costly "downgrade" from Windows Vista--if you buy a copy of Vista, you can install the 6-year-old XP operating system using the Vista license.

Red Hat is beefing up its virtualization strategy with a new embeddable hypervisor and management console, it announced Wednesday at the Red Hat Summit conference in Boston.

Red Hat released a beta version of a Linux-based hypervisor Wednesday that can be loaded onto servers and desktop computers with a flash drive.

Qumranet has released its Solid ICE desktop virtualization product to general availability this week. The company claims responsiveness and administration advantages over thin client solutions based on the results of pilot projects for several large customers, and today's released version adds multi-monitor support, in demand in the financial industry.

Yet another six months has passed and another Ubuntu Linux release is out the door. April 2008 signals the release of Ubuntu 8.04, or Hardy Heron, and follows the Feisty Fawn and Gutsy Gibbon releases of 2007 with the intention making Linux as desktop friendly as Windows or Mac OS X.

With its release today of its Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Server Edition, Linux vendor Ubuntu is firmly aiming its long-awaited, enterprise-ready server operating system at the world of business computing.

When they're released in final form on April 24, the new server and desktop variants of Ubuntu Linux version 8.04 will include features aimed at making the open source operating system easier to use and to deploy.

You're now with Qumranet which is the company behind KVM. Can you briefly tell me about the design of KVM and how that differs from previous virtualization approaches such as Xen and VMware?